E-commerce is in constant development, which is facilitated by new technologies, services, and tactical tools. To “survive” and stand out among the many online stores, you need to constantly improve your project. E-commerce analytics will help in this. How? We will tell you further.
In short, web analytics online store involves the constant collection, analysis, and interpretation of data on visitors, work with basic metrics.
The objectives of monitoring:
- improving the quality of the resource;
- Optimization of online business efficiency;
- Obtaining information for decision making;
- optimization of business processes.
Key indicators to be analyzed
1. Sales funnel
Quality analytics of the online store always begins with a sales funnel – the path of the visitor, which he passed before making a purchase. There can be several of them, depending on the number of traffic sources. It is important to analyze each stage of the funnel to understand the goals of the potential buyer and remove obstacles on his conversion path.
Let’s enumerate several traffic channels, which are standard for an online store: natural search, mailing by email, contextual advertising, social networks. Let’s describe the conditional way of the user who has come from a social network:
- Page visit
- Visitor pays attention to the post
- Clicks on it
- Goes to the target page to which the link from the post leads
- Studies the characteristics of the product
- Studies the methods of payment and delivery
- Adds the product to the “Basket”
- Places an order
- Makes a purchase
At each stage, the visitor can fall out of the funnel. It is important to analyze its path, as well as why the user stopped and finished the process without making a conversion. This will help to understand the psychology of buyers and the barriers they face.
2. Conversion
The conversion rate is calculated as the ratio of all visitors to the number of buyers. Elementary example: your site was visited by 100 people, but bought – 2. In this case, the conversion is 2%.
This dimension is the main one in the web analytics of all commercial websites. Conversion – this is evidence that you have a profit, that the project is developing. An increase in percentage depends on many factors: from page design to its functionality. Conversion monitoring allows you to understand in time that the site needs to be improved.
3. Profitable traffic sources
This report can be viewed in Google Analytics – “E-Commerce”. Using this information, you can understand which channels are the most profitable, which directions you need to “tighten”, and which, conversely, to refuse. Here you will see the number of visits from each source, as well as the income received from them.
4. Refusals rate
The cancellation rate is the number of visits for which the user has viewed only one page and then left. The search engine considers this as a negative signal indicating that the resource is useless.
There can be many reasons for refusals: irrelevant information, repulsive design, specific user motives. Clarifying these reasons and working in this direction is a big step towards increasing conversion.
It is worth noting that it is impossible to perceive the user’s failures unambiguously. Perhaps, the user just found the information he was looking for and left to “think” or compare the offer with others on the market.
In any case, it is necessary to work on reducing the percentage of refusals.
5. Exit points
That’s the name of the pages from which users most often leave. Understanding the popular exit points allows you to reduce the number of refusals. Monitoring is recommended for several parameters:
- Availability of an interesting referral link
- Absence of the goods necessary for the user
- Availability of aggressive advertising that repels the user
- Quality of texts: readability, relevance, usefulness, other reasons
Conclusion
Experts recommend to study the pages of the output and find them something that provokes the user to leave the resource.
