eCommerce platforms provide valuable data — such as conversion rates, return rates, and even top traffic sources — but the usefulness of that data is limited if you can’t view it within the context of your broader marketing strategies and campaigns.
Most web analytics teams know this and are already working with additional data sets across several platforms, such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and the major social media platforms, to better understand which marketing campaigns bring the most value.
But using several different platforms to create a full picture of your data creates new obstacles, such as:
In this post, we’re going to look at the opportunity costs of keeping your eCommerce analytics separate from the rest of your marketing data. We’ll then show you how our eCommerce clients use our platform to connect their data in a single place to perform advanced analytics and reporting with much higher efficiency.
Plus, we’ll discuss some of the additional complementary eCommerce analytics tools that give you an advanced look into tracking on-site behavior.
Are you looking to connect your omnichannel marketing data with your eCommerce analytics? Try our free 14-day trial to get a clear view of the effectiveness of your marketing strategies.
The data eCommerce platforms can incorporate varies (for example, Shopify can pull data in from Google Analytics) but what’s true across all eCommerce platforms is that they weren’t built for advanced analytics and reporting that encompasses all of your relevant data sets.
Let’s say you’re trying to gauge the success of a recently launched landing page that was designed to convert your bottom of the funnel audiences.
You can likely use your eCommerce platform to get the number of visitors from that landing page to your store and even drill down on which of those visitors you converted — but there are other questions you may also wish to answer, such as:
Without looking at your eCommerce data within the context of your ongoing marketing campaigns, you’re missing opportunities to significantly improve your online store’s performance. And by spending a lot of labor hours on manually creating reports for each campaign, your growth will be limited because your marketers will be too swamped to develop and execute new strategies.
The solution is to combine your eCommerce data and data from your marketing channels into one centralized location.
Instead of trying to get data into your eCommerce platform — where analytics and reporting functionality are limited — you can streamline your analytics by putting your eCommerce data into a customizable marketing dashboard.
When data analytics teams try to get an accurate view of their marketing efforts, they run into a significant obstacle: the data they need is decentralized due to multi-channel marketing strategies.
Using decentralized data leads to major disadvantages, including:
Let’s look at how your eCommerce company can use TapClicks to improve your company’s analytics and reporting.
With TapClicks, we have two different ways of bringing all of your data sources into one analytics dashboard.
*When we pull in your data, we do a deep historical pull (up to 12 months on some platforms). This helps your marketing team start working on data analytics immediately.
With your data in one place, you get two immediate benefits.
In short, TapClicks gives you more control over your data — letting you take a bird’s eye view or focus in on specific campaigns or ad channels.
If your eCommerce store uses Shopify, you can set up an instant-on connector that directly imports your Shopify data into TapClicks, where it can be viewed side-by-side with your marketing data.
Note: If you’re not using an eCommerce platform that we have an instant-on connector for, you can still get your eCommerce data into TapClicks via our Smart Connector.
Now you can see the relationship between ad performance and on-site metrics to help you understand key concepts such as your customer experience and customer acquisition percentages. This helps you form data-driven hypotheses about which campaigns are the most profitable for your eCommerce company’s bottom line.
Plus, TapClicks also helps you better understand your eCommerce platform’s internal data even if you’re not focusing on viewing that data within the context of your marketing campaign.
Here’s an example of a customer who wanted to view two Shopify metrics — average order value and quantity — side-by-side.
The insights this customer received by comparing internal data sets helped them discover which products contributed the most to overall sales.
Analytics and reporting go hand-in-hand. Without advanced reporting features, your analytics team is going to struggle to get the buy-in required to make changes to ongoing marketing campaigns or other eCommerce strategies.
Most eCommerce platforms don’t have advanced reporting that leverage data visualization. Instead, their data is exported out in columns and rows in a spreadsheet.
Below is an example of how TapClicks leverages data visualization to create insightful and easy-to-understand images.
In this image, we see net sales, returns, shipping costs, and taxes. Plus, in the same view, you can see the top five states, where New York is taking the lead with 31 orders.
Rather than digging through spreadsheets, summing up totals with formulas, and toggling back and forth between different screens for different states, all of your data is viewable at a high-level. From here, you can drill down to each state and start looking for more specific trends.
Because your data is centralized, you can use TapClicks to schedule recurring reports and set up KPI alerts.
With recurring reports, your analytics team creates a dashboard for the report they want to send. Let’s say they send a weekly status report that compares ad clicks with total sales. By selecting those metrics and assigning a report date, TapClicks automatically creates and sends the report to whoever you assigned as a recipient. (Note: TapClicks can send out reports in PDF, Excel, and PowerPoint formats.)
Meanwhile, your analytics team can also set up alerts to get notified that a KPI has dropped below a specific point or is no longer on track to meet a goal. As your campaigns grow, it gets increasingly difficult for your marketing team to keep an eye on all metrics, leading to costly oversights. By setting up alerts, your teams are notified when specific campaigns or metrics need their attention.
If you’re ready to see how TapClicks can improve your eCommerce analytics and reporting, try our free 14-day trial today.
Above, we talked at length about the importance of grouping together your digital marketing data with your eCommerce data.
But, you also want to look at your customer’s behavior when they visit your online store. This helps gauge whether or not your eCommerce shop is built for success.
A bad shopping cart process or a poorly optimized home page can drastically hurt your conversions, no matter how strong your digital marketing efforts are.
Below, we go over six different eCommerce analytics tools that are worth considering.
Kissmetrics tracks on-site behavior to help provide business owners with insight into metrics such as average revenue per person, visit to purchase conversion rate, site searches, and cart to purchase conversion rate.
In the graph below, you can see the drop off from those who viewed your products, added them to the cart, and then abandoned their cart at checkout.
Kissmetrics has three different pricing plans.
Crazy Egg offers its clients heatmaps, scrollmaps, and click reports.
Crazy Egg records user sessions on your eCommerce website (see below in the pricing section for how many snapshots and recordings you get for each tier).
By recording customer behavior, you get valuable insights into where people click, stop reading, or quickly scan over your content.
With Crazy Egg, the goal is to offer insights into behavior questions, such as:
Crazy Egg is especially helpful when you’re planning a redesign. By taking customer data from Crazy Egg, your design team can create a layout optimized to drive conversions and increase engagement.
Crazy Egg has three different pricing tiers.
Hotjar is another popular heat map analytics tool, with similar features and functionality as described above.
Hotjar has three different pricing categories: personal, business, and agency.
Within the personal category, there are two different tiers.
Within the business category, there are two different tiers.
Within the agency category, there aren’t set pricing tiers. Instead, they offer custom quotes based on your agency’s size and need.
But with Hotjar agency plans, you’re able to get client access to see and manage data, a customizable interface that lets you brand your reports with your logo, and a dashboard where you can manage multiple clients at once.
Hotjar and Crazy Egg share more similarities than differences. They are both analytics tools that mainly offer heatmaps, scrollmaps, and click reports.
However, if A/B testing functionality is important to your eCommerce team, it might be worth trying Crazy Egg’s free trial first, as Hotjar doesn’t offer A/B tests.
Metrilo is a real-time dashboard that’s focused on the performance of your online store. With Metrilo, you’re going to get metrics such as new customers, top-selling products, real-time revenue, conversion rates by devices (to see if your store sells more by desktop or mobile), and the average customer lifetime value.
Plus, like a more involved Google Analytics, you can also see which social media channels and other referrals (such as influencers and affiliates) are bringing your eCommerce the most revenue.
Metrilo is designed to strengthen your eCommerce platform and comes with 5-minute integrations for WooCommerce, Magento, and Shopify.
Metrilo offers three different pricing tiers.
Note: All plans come with unlimited team members, one-click installation processes, live chat and email support, and are cheaper when your team pays annually instead of monthly.
Mixpanel tracks user interactions (both mobile and web applications) and lets you actively communicate with your customers.
With Mixpanel, you can run A/B tests, send out exit surveys to your customers who are about to click off the page, and so on.
Mixpanel has three main pricing tiers: the free plan, the growth plan, and the enterprise plan.
Woopra works to get you the data you need to help you understand user behavior on your eCommerce site, capturing the entire lifecycle of your customer once they visit your site. This data is meant to help you optimize your site towards your customer.
The main features are:
Woopra offers three different pricing plans.
In this post, we went over some of the best eCommerce analytics tools available. However, what will work for your online store at this moment will depend on what you’re looking to get out of your eCommerce analytics software.
If your main focus is improving the conversion rate of users who land on your page via changes to your checkout cart or strategic placement of your CTAs, then a tool like Crazy Egg or Hotjar will be beneficial. By looking at where people click — and running split tests to validate your hypotheses — you can reduce your bounce rate and increase customer engagement.
But if you’re looking to view your eCommerce data in the context of your entire marketing strategy, then TapClicks will be a major win for your operations.
With TapClicks, you can centralize data from eCommerce platforms, advertising platforms, CRM tools, and more, and organize all of those data sets within one dashboard.
From there, you can view data at a bird’s eye level — getting a broad view of your marketing analytics, or you can segment down to look for specific trends or ad performance.
Finally, with our reporting studio, you can easily create visually compelling reports (and leverage automation) to get buy-in from your stakeholders when you propose a change to your eCommerce strategies.
If you’re ready to see how TapClicks can improve your eCommerce analytics and reporting, try our free 14-day trial today.