What Data Do You Need to Optimise Your Ecommerce Business in 2021
If you’re looking for ways to grow your ecommerce store then you need to start by looking at the data and understanding what you’re doing right, and what needs to be improved. We take a look at what data you should be using to optimize your ecommerce business in 2021.
Conversion rate
Your ecommerce store’s conversion rate is the number of people that actually complete the checkout process and make a purchase compared with the number of visitors that you have. You’ll need to have a reporting tool set up such as Google Analytics and you can work out the conversion rate of your overall store, and the conversion rate for individual pages.
Your overall conversion rate is a good way to get a quick idea of how well your store is doing and to measure the success of any changes you make to optimize your store. You can monitor the conversion rate of individual product pages as well to understand which ones work and which ones you need to update.
Website traffic and source
One of the priorities for optimizing your ecommerce business is going to be increasing the number of visitors to your site. Alongside improving your conversion rate, driving more traffic to your site is an essential part of boosting your sales.
Traffic source data will give you an insight into how people are discovering your ecommerce website. You’ll be able to understand whether they are finding your site in organic search results, paid ads, on social media, in emails, or links from other sites.
With this data, you can make an informed decision about what marketing strategies and channels you should be focusing on to increase traffic.
Overall, it’s a good idea to have a diverse range of traffic sources. It means you have a good online presence across different platforms, and you won’t be as impacted by any issues with one channel for example if a search engine update affects your ranking.
You’ll also be able to monitor how well your existing marketing campaigns are working. For example, whether focusing on one social platform is driving traffic to your site. And you’ll be able to identify which traffic sources actually convert into customers so that you can prioritize those or reduce your efforts with channels that don’t convert.
Average Order Value and Customer Lifetime Value
Once you’ve invested time and money into attracting shoppers to your ecommerce store, you want them to spend as much as possible to make it worthwhile. To optimize your business you need to be collecting data on how much your customers spend each time and over their lifetime.
Track your customers’ average spend and look at ways to boost it such as cross-selling, upselling, or with a minimum spend for free shipping. Monitor Customer Lifetime Value to work out how much you can spend acquiring customers so that you make enough profit.
The ecommerce platform you’re using to run your store should keep an accurate record of all your sales and reports that are easy to download. Platforms such as Shopify and WooCommerce provide in-depth analytics and reporting that you can use to track your customers’ spend. However, with a more basic platform such as osCommerce, as mentioned in the osCommerce review, you may need to use plugins for additional data functionality. The choice depends on what you need from your store .
Search terms
Looking at the search terms that visitors are using to search your own store is another good indicator of how you can optimize your business.
You can find out what products your visitors are actually looking for, and what terms they use to search for them. It will help you to identify any products that visitors want when they visit your store and you don’t already stock. And it will help you to optimize your product titles and descriptions if people are using slightly different words and phrases to search for certain products and not finding them.
Additionally, the search terms used on your site is also a good indicator of what keywords you should be targeting on your website so that your store appears in the relevant search engine results page.
Behavior analytics
Behavior analytics is also an important indicator of how well your ecommerce site is performing, and how it could be improved.
You can use the Behaviour Flow report in Google Analytics to understand how visitors are navigating through your website — it’ll show what page they first arrive on, which pages they move on to, and which page they’re on when they leave. This will highlight which pages have the most drop-offs so that you can identify any problems or changes you need to make to encourage people to stay on your site.
Heatmap tools such as Crazy Egg will also give you an insight into how people are interacting with each page on your site, especially ones that aren’t converting as well as you’d expect.
For example, you might find that people aren’t clicking on your ‘buy now’ call to action links because they’re either too small or in the wrong place. It’ll help you to optimize your site so that it’s more intuitive and matches how people use it.
These are just a few of the most important aspects of your business to track so that you can optimize your store. Collecting and analyzing the data for your ecommerce business is a continual process that’s essential to improving and growing your business.
- What Data Do You Need to Optimise Your Ecommerce Business in 2021 - January 27, 2021
- 5 Low-Cost Ways Your Ecommerce Business Can Start To Use Big Data - June 21, 2019
