How to Get Better Insights From Your Ecommerce Analytics

March 23, 2022

623a32b96c035343ee1bd1b4 Get More From Your Ecommerce Analytics With Googles Enhanced Ecommerce ecommerce analytics

As a scaling ecommerce brand, you’re focused on creating the best possible online shopping experience.

Whether it’s through innovative website design or especially personalized shopping, you want to smooth out friction in the customer journey.

The only way to be sure you’re converting to your potential, though, is with a solid ecommerce analytics setup. You need end-to-end visibility into your funnel to see trends on what’s working or what’s blocking purchases.

And with multiple campaigns and promotions going,it’s near impossible to determine what’s moving the needle without a solid analytics setup.

Today, you’ll walk away with a clear understanding of why you should track certain ecommerce analytics, best practices, and how and why you should set up and use Enhanced Ecommerce tracking in Google Analytics—plus some easy wins we recommend once GA tracking is in place.

Skip ahead:

What is ecommerce analytics?

Ecommerce analytics refers to the gathering of data from every channel/area that has an impact on your online store and using it to gauge the success of your business.

It’s more than just understanding your ecommerce conversion rate or revenue per user—ecommerce analytics encompasses the entire customer journey. Once collected, ecommerce analytics data can be used to identify trends on your site, adapt your strategy, and test new campaigns and conversion-driving features.

The types of ecommerce analytics

It can be overwhelming to open up your Shopify or Google Analytics dashboard and see the different metrics, charts, and graphs. There’s a lot of information, which can feel like a blessing and a curse.

Let’s look at individual metrics buckets in Google Analytics and the most important metrics to track in each.

Audience

This data offers an in-depth look at who your audience is through demographic metrics like location, age, gender, occupation, income, and more.

Google Analytics audience metrics
Google Analytics audience metrics
(Image Source) 

Audience metrics help you understand not only who your customers are but how they interact with your ecommerce channels through information like device type and browser. You can use this information to tailor your online experiences to fit what resonates with your audience the most.

  • For example, if you know most of your customers use smartphones to shop on your site and live in various cities across the world, you can create a mobile experience (i.e. it’ll need to be lightning-fast), custom to each location, and account for the fact that not every country has access to 5G speeds.
  • Going a step further, you can target returning customers using audience data and share exclusive content like early access to your next sale or pop-up shop event.

Knowing who your customers are and how they’re engaging with your store online thanks to broad audience insights makes it easier to create engaging content and experiences that move the needle.

#cta-visual-fe#<cta-title>Create the Ecommerce Experience You Envision<cta-title>See how you can build a lightning-fast online store with Shogun Frontend—no compromises. Learn more

Acquisition

Acquisition metrics take things a step further by offering insight on how your audience is finding your store and engaging with your brand.

This type of ecommerce analytics also identifies your best-performing channels (i.e. direct, paid, display, referral/affiliate, etc.) so you can double down on optimizing those experiences.

Google Analytics acquisition metrics
(Image Source)

Metrics like click-through rate, customer lifetime value, and cost per lead gauge how your acquisition channels are performing.

  • For example, if you see that a lot of customers make their way to your website from Instagram, you can think of ways to make Instagram more shoppable for your customers—like with Instagram influencers or Instagram Shopping.
  • Or, if you see that your email marketing isn’t as effective as you’d hoped, you can experiment with your cadence or campaign type to help drive traffic to your site.

Having a pulse on which channels are your star players (and which ones aren’t) will help you optimize your marketing efforts and ensure you’re spending time (and money) on what propels you toward your store’s growth goals.

Behavior

After you know how people find your store, what about what they’re doing once there? 

Behavior metrics like new users, sessions, page views, and bounce rate paint a picture of how customers engage with your site, content, and other channels.

Google Analytics behavior metrics
Google Analytics behavior metrics
(Image Source)
  • For example, if site visitors don’t go on to view subsequent pages after landing on your site, your bounce rate will spike.
  • From there, you can troubleshoot why this might be the case. For many brands, slow site speed is usually the culprit behind a high bounce rate, so you can take steps to improve your site performance.

#cta-visual-fe#<cta-title>Lightning-fast Site Performance—Without the Compromises.<cta-title>Get the fast-loading site of your ecommerce dreams with Shogun Frontend. Learn more

Having a pulse on behavior metrics also helps you develop your customer journey map so you can fine-tune your overall ecommerce experience.

Conversions

Last but certainly not least, conversion-based metrics help you understand how and why customers convert on your site.

Of course, knowing the number of conversions your site drives in a given period is important but you can go a step further.

Conversion metrics in Google Analytics help you answer questions like:

  • Did customers convert because of the sale you ran recently? Or something else?
  • How long does it take customers to convert from their first interaction with your site to checkout?
  • Are customers making repeat purchases?
  • What products are customers purchasing?
  • How many customers abandon their cart instead of purchasing?
  • What’s preventing customers from converting?

Conversion metrics help inform aspects of your marketing strategy like sales logistics (the cadence and the kind of sale you run, like a flash sale), product page layouts, checkout optimizations, and more.

What are the benefits of tracking your ecommerce analytics properly?

1. Better, data-backed decision-making

No more relying on your intuition to make decisions about growing your store.

With a solid ecommerce analytics set up, you get tangible numbers to guide your decision-making, so you know you’re making an informed choice every time. Brands with data-driven methods see a 23x higherlikelihood of acquiring customers(!) than those operating on gut instinct alone.

This not only leads to more growth, faster, but it can save you money (to allocate to high-impact efforts you know will work).

2. Gauge the effectiveness of your marketing

By checking in on your ecommerce analytics or source-of-truth, you get an accurate gauge of how your marketing campaigns are driving conversions for your store.

Without a baseline understanding of how campaigns are performing, it’ll be difficult to know if you’re seeing positive ROI.

This is especially important as you partner with agencies, for example, or initiate something like a rebrand.

It’s notoriously difficult to isolate and know whether something like a rebrand caused more conversions, but whether it’s your new Facebook ads, new Instagram influencer partnership, or your rebrand, you’ll want to know the ROI on your initiatives to know where to continue investing.

3. Improve trend forecasting and budget allocation

Ecommerce analytics empower you to better see how your business is performing now and how it’s likely to perform in the future.

For example, if you’re thinking about launching a new shopping feature like adding a virtual reality try-on to your eyeglasses site, you can use past trend data from something similar to determine how best to promote this new site interaction, or estimate its potential ability to drive sales for the cost.

4. Supercharge your personalization efforts

Strong site personalization is often built on data collection. A stronger ecommerce analytics setup gives you powerful insights for fueling the best shopping experience for your individual customers.

For example, let’s say your brand sells luxury skincare products and is launching a new line of anti-aging serums.

From your data, you can target an ideal segment of customers who might be interested in this new line—like customers who visit other anti-aging product pages and engage with other anti-aging content on your site.

The merchants who build effective personalization campaigns based on this data will open themselves up to more conversions because their ecommerce experience is optimized to do so.

5. Elevate your inventory management

No matter how big your product catalog is, having a squeaky-clean inventory system gives you clarity on what products you have, what’s hot, and what needs to go. Knowing how much product you have on hand in real-time (and what’s actually selling) can help inform sales, product ordering, marketing, and more.

Plus, having old inventory on your shelves can be costly—in July 2020, US retailers were holding about $1.33 in inventory for every $1 in sales.

6. Optimize your customer experience

Because ecommerce analytics give you the whole picture of how your business is performing, you have the opportunity to create the best customer experience.

Data helps you identify gaps in your experience so you know where you need to improve or how you could make a great, high-converting experience even better.

Should you set up Enhanced Ecommerce in Google Analytics?

There’s no question the information you glean from your Google Analytics dashboard is valuable. But what if we told you there’s a way to get even more from this tool? 

Enter: Enhanced Ecommerce.

With Enhanced Ecommerce, you can learn even more about the health of your business like shopping and purchasing behavior, economic performance, and more.

What is Enhanced Ecommerce in GA?

Enhanced Ecommerce with Google Analytics is in-depth reporting for ecommerce transactions. In other words, you get reporting from across the entire customer journey so you can build the best shopping experience possible.

What kind of insights can you get with Enhanced Ecommerce?

Once Enhanced Ecommerce is enabled in your Google Analytics account, you can learn things like:

  • The number of clicks on a product link
  • If customers initiate the checkout process for a product
  • If customers add or remove a product from a shopping cart
  • If customers apply a coupon code to a purchase

With information like this, you can make even the smallest adjustment to your ecommerce experience and see a big impact.

Let’s look at a few of the best reports you can view with Enhanced Ecommerce and why they’re so great:

Shopping behavior report

  • See the number of sessions at each stage of your funnel
  • See how shoppers move through the funnel from top to bottom, complete with insights like how many visitors initiated checkout
  • Identify holes or drop-offs in your customer journey that need fixing to increase sales

Product list performance report

  • View insights about related products and opportunities for cross-selling and up-selling
  • View information on product list views, clicks, CTR based on how your products are grouped on your site

Internal promotion report

  • Gauge the performance of internal promotion with metrics like views, clicks, CTR, transactions, revenue, and more on tools like banners

Together, these reports (plus others!) offer immense insight into how customers behave on your site, which enables you to build the best shopping experience.

How to set up Enhanced Ecommerce in Google Analytics

Setting up Enhanced Ecommerce in Google Analytics can be involved depending on your store, but it’s worth the time spent setting it up!

You have two options when setting up Enhanced Ecommerce:

After you’re set-up with Enhanced Ecommerce, here are a few opportunities to hit the ground running:

  • Check your Channels Report to see which channels are driving the most revenue or have the highest conversion rate. Access this report under Acquisition > All Traffic.
  • Check your “Shopping” and “Checkout” Behavior Reports to see a funnel visualization of different steps throughout the customer journey. These reports will help you see how customers are moving through your funnel so you can identify opportunities for improvement at each touchpoint. Access these reports under Conversion > Ecommerce.

Ecommerce analytics best practices

The ecommerce world is constantly evolving but you can always count on your data to be your True North.

Here are a few best practices that will help you concentrate on the right ecommerce analytics (to then improve your shopping experience and improve your conversion rate):

Learn from the data experts

We keep up with so much as marketers, so let these ecommerce analytics experts keep up on trends for you:

  • Simo Ahava: Simo is described by Shogun’s Data Architect, Rich Hanna, as “the Michael Jordan of Data Collection.” Simo’s blog is packed with his thoughts and expertise on web analytics, digital marketing, SEO, and more. You can also learn from him in his online course on technical marketing, Simmer or sign up for his newsletter.
  • Charles Farina: Charles is the Head of Innovation at Adswerve, a marketing analytics agency and Google Marketing and Cloud partner. His tweets will keep you up to speed on all things Google Analytics as he often announces updates ahead of Google.
  • Julius Fedorovicious: Julius is the founder of Analytics Mania—a go-to resource on Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, and related ecommerce analytics topics. Analytics Mania has resources including ebooks, checklists, and courses to keep you in the know on the latest with Google Analytics.

#cta-paragraph-fe#Learn from Shogun’s own Data Architect, Rich Hanna, on why tracking metrics for progressive web apps is different from traditional sites on Commerce Shift. Sign up to get notified when the episode drop.

Visualize your data with the best tools

Wouldn’t it be easy if you could look at your data, wave a magic wand, and know exactly what you’re supposed to do next?

Tools like Google Data Studio (it’s free and links to your Google Analytics account) and Looker, among others, help you visualize and understand your data better with various charts, graphs, funnel visualizations, and more.

Automate where you can

Pulling and sending reports is time-consuming (especially if you have to send to folks who aren’t in the weeds like you are each day). Automating data collection into easy-to-read/hare reports saves you time, energy, and ensures consistency.

Make your data available to the entire team

Data sharing is crucial to building an ecommerce team that moves in sync towards the same goals. Without access to your data, it’ll be challenging to make the best decisions.

Centralizing your data in one place will make it easier for the whole team to access the right data.

Ecommerce analytics is the key to exponential growth

Knowing what metrics to track is just the start to creating engaging ecommerce experiences.

To build something memorable and, well, exceptional, brands need to go beyond basic ecommerce analytics and identify ways to stand out and resonate with customers.

#cta-visual-fe#<cta-title>Create the Ecommerce Experience You Envision for Your Customers<cta-title>See how you can build a dynamic online store with Shogun Frontend—no compromises. Learn more

Ecommerce analytics frequently asked questions

What is the best ecommerce analytics tool?

We won’t go as far as to rank any (that’s another post!) but there are several top tools for tracking ecommerce analytics.

A few of the most popular include:

What is the difference between KPIs, analytics, metrics, and reporting?

These terms often get used interchangeably, but they all mean different things! Here’s a breakdown of each:

  • KPIs: Key performance indicator – used to measure success by comparing actual data to forecasted data
  • Analytics: Analytics are used to forecast and predict outcomes
  • Metrics: A standard of measurement (e.g., page views)
  • Reporting: Reports summarize both past and current data and paint a picture of what’s currently happening with your business in relation to the previous period

Do you track ecommerce analytics the same on a headless site?

Not quite! Because headless sites typically load only once, metrics like sessions and ecommerce conversion rate is tracked a bit differently.

Working with a unified frontend platform like Shogun Frontend means you get access to a team of implementation specialists and analytics resources who can ensure your site is tracking and performing from launch day onward.

#cta-visual-fe#<cta-title>Thinking About Going Headless?<cta-title>Learn more about how Shogun Frontend can take your brand headless without the headache. Learn more

Kaitlyn Ambrose

Kaitlyn works on all things content at Shogun. ⚡

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