by Kathleen Booth, on Mar 2, 2021 9:00:00 AM
Understanding things like product performance, customer behavior, and seasonal buying trends is part of running a successful ecommerce business. Ecommerce analytics tools make gathering this vast array of data—and doing something with it—much easier.
Ecommerce can be a transactional relationship, but brands that do it well create a lasting impression that extends beyond the end of the transaction. Attracting and retaining the right customers is the key to success, and any misstep (from misaligned coupon strategies to off-brand social media messaging) could cost a lot.
That’s why analysis is crucial.
There are great ecommerce analytics tools out there that pull from multiple sources and deliver actionable data right to your doorstep. Here are some of our favorites.
Ecommerce Analytics: Tools for Marketing
Ecommerce marketing is an important driver of brand awareness, customer acquisition, and customer retention. Ads, affiliate marketing, retargeting, emails: all of it costs money, making it crucial to measure the impact that your marketing spend is having on your business.
This means measuring return on investment (ROI) and return on ad spend (ROAS). The right marketing tools for ecommerce will help you measure both of these metrics, and in doing so, will shed light on what is and isn’t working.
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Google Analytics
Google Analytics is essential to any business’s data analytics strategy, but it's especially important for ecommerce businesses.
Because it is so integrated with your marketing tools (and with so many of those tools under the Google roof, like YouTube and Google Ads), a lot of your data may already be visible and organized within Google itself. For example, you can track all of your linked AdWords/Ad accounts to see your pay-per-click (PPC) ad performance, as well as things like site traffic and site ranking.
Matomo
Touted as an “alternative to Google Analytics," Matomo is used by a lot of ecommerce brands to get data similar to what you might find in GA.
Using Matomo, you can connect to your ecommerce software platforms (including payment methods/records), social media accounts, and your company’s website. The dashboard has tabled, graphed, and visualized data sets that reflect back user activity and behavior.
Kissmetrics
Kissmetrics is used by ecommerce brands to track marketing analytics across both apps and websites.
The data goes beyond standard key performance indicators (KPIs) like time on site or bounce rate and analyzes patterns in user behavior. The insights it provides can be a powerful when making marketing decisions.
Kissmetrics integrates with Shopify and reports on things like checkout funnel stats, subscription revenue and categorized lifetime value of products.
Ecommerce Analytics: Revenue and KPIs
The most important KPI to keep your eye on when it comes to your ecommerce business is always revenue.
The next category of tools collect and analyze data around revenue and product performance, or the steps users take on the path to providing revenue.
Some of the more important KPIs to track when it comes to measuring the impact on revenue are conversion rates, transactions, customer lifecycle, average order value, shopping cart abandon rates and more.
Mixpanel
Mixpanel is a product analysis tool that can help ecommerce brands track the success of both product categories and individual products. It does this by helping users to identify “power users”, rate drivers, drop off points (by building retroactive funnels), and user retention rates.
Woopra
Woopra is a data-driven system that analyzes the customer journey. It tracks all touchpoints and user interactions, building out a better picture of the customer experience. This can then be used to identify customer trends, improve customer retention rates, and segment out customers based on their actions.
Woopra comes complete with advanced syncing options, so you can hook the system up to your databases and let historical data inform the big picture.
Daasity
Daasity is built for ecommerce merchants and combines all of the most important ecommerce data (like new customers, ADV, total valid units, total valid orders, units per order, average gross margin, etc.) in one visual dashboard. It’s designed to provide at-a-glance insights into what is selling, where the sales are coming from, and how much they’re worth.
As the body of data in Daasity grows, so does an e-retailer’s understanding of whether goals are being met and what the exact numbers are.
cleanCART
We're definitely biased, but we believe cleanCART provides online retailers with data they can't get anywhere else.
cleanCART is meant to help you understand and control the effects coupon extensions have on your bottom line. The use of unauthorized coupons, made possible by coupon browser extensions, could be costing you big time. Make sure you are aware of how much they are bringing cart value down and if big discounts are going to users they shouldn’t.
Read The Ultimate Guide to Ecommerce Marketing
Discover a solution built to help you block the negative effect coupon extensions have on your bottom line.
Ecommerce Analytics: Tools for Websites
In any business, a website is one of the only appreciable digital assets you will own. For ecommerce brands, a website literally IS the business. This means that the health of your website directly impacts the success of your business.
Here are some of the tools you can use to audit and manage your ecommerce website.
Hotjar
Hotjar is an on-site, real time analysis tool that generates heatmaps and even records user behavior on your site.
Heatmaps provide actual data about where users are hovering, stopping their scroll, or interacting with the pages on your website.
Want to know whether a new landing page, icon, web redesign or product layout is working? Hotjar will shed light on that and provide actionable analytics for site improvements.
SEMRush
SEMRush is a comprehensive SEO (search engine optimization) tool that has earned the trust of the SEO community. Because organic traffic is the only freebie you get in this business, it’s important to make it work for you and SEO is at the heart of that.
SEMRush can provide data on how your site is performing in terms of traffic, give numbers about site health, issue real-time rank change alerts, and offer content recommendations to improve search engine rankings.
Protect Your Ecommerce Margins
Increase average order value by blocking discount codes from coupon extensions like Honey, CapitalOne Shopping, Piggy, and more.
Leadfeeder
Leadfeeder is meant to help you optimize your website for lead generation. By tracking site visitors, the platform can give you alerts about leads who are ready to buy.
Leadfeeder plays nice with most CRMs, integrating with Pipedrive, Mailchimp, Salesforce, Hubspot, Zoho, etc. With these integrations, you can automate lead follow ups and capitalize on new site leads with speed and precision.
The Bottom Line
There are quite a few ecommerce analytics tools to help you optimize your ecommerce strategy from start to finish.
What’s most important is this: if you are going to collect data, use it to make decisions. Data without action provides no value.
