Ecommerce Analytics: What to Track and Analyze to Gain a Competitive Advantage (2023)

If you're going on a road trip, you'll likely prepare for your trip with a detailed map to make sure you get to your destination, don't make any wrong turns, and get to your destination quickly and efficiently.

The same applies to your company. Accurate analytics can be the roadmap to your company's success.

Knowing the current performance of your business is crucial for any e-commerceresellers. Otherwise, you won't know if your existing strategies and processes are working or if your investments are generating sufficient returns. It also means you don't know if and when you're making mistakes or what you need to correct to improve your numbers.

That's why eCommerce analytics are vital if you want your DTC brand to grow. In this post, we'll help you identify the most important metrics andKey Performance IndicatorsYou need to keep up with ecommerce analytics and the best tools to help you gain a competitive edge.

What is ecommerce analytics?

E-commerce analytics refers to the process of collecting and analyzing data related to various aspects of your e-commerce operations. This includes everything from marketing and sales to website engagement, fulfillment and logistics. The goal is to gain meaningful insights into trends, business performance, back-end processes, and more.online consumer behaviorSo you can make data-driven decisions based on these insights.

Analytics: The Secret Weapon for Top Ecommerce Brands

Brands can use ecommerce analytics to gain valuable and actionable insights into their business and operations. From identifying gaps in their existing processes to better understanding their customers, business owners can benefit greatly from analyzing the data they collect. These insights can better inform different aspects of your business to drive growth and improve the customer experience.

Implement data-driven strategies

From marketing to website design to warehousing, data analytics helps DTC brands create data-driven strategies. Ecommerce analytics can tell you which marketing strategies are resonating with your target audience, where user abandonment occurs on your site, and how much stock would be enough and when. All these insights will tell you how to make strategic decisions that will help you in the long run.

Using eCommerce analytics takes the guesswork out of your strategies so you can execute plans flawlessly and make a positive impact.

Understand and meet customer expectations

Are people more likely to buy your products after interacting with a live chat agent? Are they more likely to buy a certain product at a certain time of year? Are there any comments that point to an often unsatisfactory experience?

Ecommerce analytics allows brands to gather answers to these questions and understand how to make improvements based on customer behavior, preferences and needs.

Optimize marketing and sales campaigns

Ecommerce analytics can help you understand how customers find you so you can capitalize on the most profitable channels. You can also understand what type of message resonates best with your target audience, allowing you to optimize your ad campaigns for maximum impact.

Reduce supply chain and fulfillment costs

E-commerce analytics can also alert you to where supply chain bottlenecks are occurring and how to make the entire process more efficient, not only improving fulfillment speed but also reducing costs. You can use it to identify any steps in the process that might cost a lot more than they should, so you can investigate and adjust them as needed.

Why Analytics in ECommerce Are Often Ignored or Underused

While analytics are important, they are often overlooked or overlooked in ecommerce because they can be so complicated. Ecommerce operations involve a lot of moving parts and there are a lot of things that need to be tracked across different departments and processes. Collecting and analyzing third-party data and switching between multiple platforms for metrics and analytics can be challenging.

The inability to get a single dashboard to track all aspects of your eCommerce operations makes the job extremely challenging. so manyE-commerceCompanies can limit their analysis to just a few aspects of their processes and struggle to discover insights that can be translated into action. One of the solutions to deal with the complexities and challenges of data collection and analysis in e-commerce is to use aSelf-service reporting tool. With self-service reporting tools, eCommerce store owners and managers can easily report on key performance indicators such as website traffic, conversion rates, average order value and customer retention.

Top ecommerce metrics to analyze

Since there are so many metrics you can track with ecommerce analytics, it's important to focus on the metrics that matter the most. This may vary based on your company's unique goals and may change by campaign.

In addition to campaign-related metrics, these are some of the most importantE-Commerce Metricscompanies often need to track to conduct their analysis:

• Exchange rate
• Cart Abandonment Rate
• website traffic
• bounce rate
• scroll depth
• exit fee
• collection points
• Quelle/Medium traffic
• Demographics
• Location
• Return on advertising spend (ROA)
• revenue per visitor
• cost per acquisition
• Average order value
• Ad reach and impressions
• E-Mail-Klickrate
• SKU performance
• average delivery time
• Average service time
• Average cost of inventory per unit
• Average cost of care per unit
• Average shipping costs
• stock turnover rate
• Order accuracy rate
• on-time compliance
• sales and profit
• Customer lifetime value
• turnover rate
• retention rate
• Refund and Return Fee
• Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Website metrics and engagement

It's important to keep track of metrics that measure how your website is performing and how customers are interacting with it. You can use this to identify issues with your web design or placement and where you should make improvements to get more engagement.

Marketing and sales metrics

These metrics help you measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and your current sales performance. Analyzing your marketing and sales metrics can give you the information you need to refine your targeting and campaign messages.

Inventory and Fulfillment Metrics

These metrics give you an idea of ​​how well the storage and fulfillment aspects of your e-commerce operations are doing. They help you identify process inefficiencies and learn how to make improvements to streamline service and improve the delivery experience for your customers.

Bonus Business Metrics

In addition to these category-specific metrics, there are several other metrics that are important to measure. This gives you better insight into how your ecommerce business is performing, especially when it comes to keeping your customers happy and engaged.

Manually tracking all these metrics can be challenging, if not impossible. Fortunately, there are several eCommerce analytics tools that can automatically collect and process the data to give you the information you need.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free tool that provides a detailed analysis of your website's performance. It helps you to track your website traffic and break it down by source, demographics and geographic location. It also provides insights into your conversions, abandonment rates, and refunds for a comprehensive view of your store's performance.

Hotjar

Oheat mapThe tracking tool helps you analyze how users are behaving on your site so you can see what they're interacting with, where their attention is and how your optimization efforts are changing their behavior.

Woopra

With Woopra, you can visualize how visitors move around your website and how different products and marketing campaigns affect their behavior. It provides a detailed breakdown of where visitors drop off in the journey and how many users convert from Google AdWords.

Visible

Matomo is a powerful alternative to Google Analytics, providing comprehensive insights into your website's performance. In addition to the analytics you get with GA, it also offers conversion optimization features like heatmaps, A/B testing, and form analytics. Furthermore, you can even check all the actions taken by individual users on your website.

ruler analysis

This comprehensive analytics solution integrates with your website, CRM and other marketing applications to automatically generate accurate information about your sales and earnings. It lets you measure the performance of different marketing channels by revenue and leads generated and compare it to cost, allowing you to analyze ROAS and CPA for each revenue stream.

Crealytics

With the Crealytics CLV platform, you can accurately measure the value of your customers with detailed insightsCustomer lifetime value,Order margins and storage costs. It also gives you an idea of ​​how well your advertising efforts are paying off, with ROAS insights and a channel-by-channel breakdown of churn rate.

DISCOVER

Omniconvert REVEAL is a comprehensive ecommerce analytics platform that allows you to track metrics such as revenue, margin, number of customers, AOV and average order per customer. You can also understand customer-facing performance insights with CLV, NPS, and retention rate data.

MailTag

MailTag is an email tool that provides advanced information about your email performance. It shows you details like average open rate and link click rate so you can understand the effectiveness of your email campaigns.

BeProfit

Available to both Shopify and Wix users, BeProfit allows you to accurately measure your ecommerce profits. It pulls data on your spend, marketing performance, CLV, platform-related conversions, and ROAS to provide you with accurate profit analysis and identify your most profitable products.

callback logic

This tool provides SKU-level information about your returns, helping you understand return rates and lost sales for each item. It also provides an analysis of the design variants that produce the most returns so you can determine if there are any issues with your products or processes.

ShipBob

ShipBob offers a free analytics tool that provides detailed insights into your inventory, fulfillment and logistics performance. You can use it to understand how to best allocate your inventory, when to reorder inventory, where you currently are in terms of order fulfillment, and how much you are spending to fill each order.

Bonus: ECommerce Enhanced by Google Analytics

As the name indicates,Enhanced ECommerce is a Google Analytics PluginThis gives you advanced insights into how your eCommerce store is performing. You can use it to better understand your customers' shopping experience by tracking behaviors throughout the entire customer journey. It provides information on average order value, sales, cart abandonment rates, and more.

How ShipBob Gives Its Customers A Competitive Edge With Its Analytics - For Free

Many eCommerce brands are already tracking their website's engagement, sales, and marketing performance. However, analytics related to inventory, shipping and logistics tend to take a backseat, mainly because it is difficult to collect data from so many sources and extract valuable information from them.

Fortunately, ShipBob with one gives you the competitive edge you need.kostenloses analytics reporting toolThis allows you to track all these metrics in one place. It helps you analyze efficiencies and costs in various aspects of your inventory management and fulfillment processes so you can identify opportunities for improvement.

This tool analyzes how much inventory you store in the ShipBob fulfillment network, when to reorder inventory, what your best selling items are and which ones are driving up your holding fees. It also automatically offers suggestions on how to proceed.distribute your stock optimallyto reduce transit time and lower handling costs.

OAnalyse-Dashboardprovides an overview of key fulfillment metrics such as total cost to fulfill, average cost to fulfill per order, and percentage of orders fulfilled on time. This allows you to understand where you currently stand and quickly identify if there are any issues with your fulfillment processes.

With these detailed inventory and fulfillment insights, thekostenloses analytics reporting toolfor ShipBob Users helps you stay ahead of the competition by showing you how to make your eCommerce fulfillment more accessible and efficient.

Start using ShipBob today to use these tools to better manage your company's eCommerce analytics.