Most business owners are getting adept at delving into website analytics and picking out some everyday information like the visitors stats, traffic sources etc. But what’s uncommon is knowing insightful key report areas. That said, we will be referring to the ecommerce merchants here.
If you need actionable insights into how well your business is doing, you must know the key areas to look into. Here are a few that every ecommerce merchant must make use of that in order to effectively gauge the sales performance of an ecommerce website:
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A funnel is the step by step process you define to achieve your final desired goal. In the case of an ecommerce website, this could consist of say, ‘Add to cart’, ‘Shipping’, ‘Billing’, ‘Review order’ and ‘Check out complete’.
While the final desired goal may be the ‘Check out complete’ step where you bring the money in, it is also important to look at the entire check out process. The ultimate treasure lies if you further broke this down into traffic segments by ‘medium’ to see the percentage completion of each step within the defined conversion path from various traffic mediums. For example, the percentage of visitors who complete the ‘Add to cart’ step can tell you how influential each channel of traffic has been in generating interest among the visitors.
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The ‘All Traffic’ section under ‘Acquisition’ gives you the aggregate figure on the total number of visits from various channels. This includes data on visits from the search engines, email campaigns, paid ads, referral websites, people typing in your URL into the browser etc. What this means to an ecommerce merchant is that, it could help analyse ecommerce conversion rates by traffic medium. For instance, if the sales from a paid ad campaign is turning out too low, there might be various reasons to its effect. It could be a poor ad copy, a less informative landing page, a bad conversion path etc. Likewise if the sales from a different medium is found to be very profitable, marketer could consider investing in more budget to it.
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Breaking down the data by days of the week can provide insightful information to the online retailers. You could analyze which days of the week bring in the highest conversion rates, and which days bring in the lowest. Similarly, breaking down by hours would tell us the precise time range where conversions happen the most during any particular day, or if there is such a trend seen at all. These data can help a marketer gather important information on taking decisions that will benefit the sales front. For instance, if the sales are observed too low between a particular time range, the retailer may decide to run an online promotion campaign during the low converting hours.
These are only few of the many ideas that analytics help in providing insightful information on the performance of ecommerce websites. Though these are the key ones that throw instant light on aligning the main multiple metrics and dimensions help us in understanding the influence and profitability of the marketing mix, and assign appropriate credit to each channel.
We conclude our discussions with the Google Analytics video on Multi-Channel Funnels.
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Its a nice blog about ecommerce analytics report view segment and very informative for all viewers