On the first day of The Internet Marketing Conference, Google invited me to attend a private presentation to see new developments in their Analytics platform. This session covered the entire suite of Google tools and how they could benefit marketers. One important takeaway I found interesting was the current industry trend in tracking sales data over ecommerce performance. For many years, companies have broken out their conversions by referring traffic (organic search, paid search, affiliates, etc.) but they were not concerned with how these transactions were taking place. Now companies are looking to understand more about the transactions which is driving attention to ecommerce reporting software.
While you will likely always rely on Google Analytics for your ecommerce data, there are a number of other tools that can provide you with extra data. If you’re interested in ecommerce tracking tools or would like to find out more about free ecommerce analytics tools, then this article is for you.
One of the main ways for businesses to understand the traffic that is being generated by their ecommerce website is through the use of ecommerce tracking tools. You see, when you engage in affiliate marketing, you can create leads that are interested in buying products or services from a specific business.
What are ecommerce tracking tools? You might have heard of or seen them used by merchants. You might even be confused about what some ecommerce tracking tools can do for you. But don’t worry — I’ve got you covered. An in-depth look at my favorite ecommerce tracking tools will give you an idea of what they are and how they work, with a brief description of the different reporting templates, analytics and metrics they contain.
Top ecommerce analytics tools
Optimizely
If you’re looking to create a more personalized and authentic shopping experience, Optimizely’s ecommerce specific features can be an effective place to start. The platform centers around using A/B testing and experimentation to create more authentic experiences and ultimately drive conversions.
Use Optimizely to:
- Collect actionable customer-focused data to influence site optimization
- Experiment with simplified checkout flows to reduce shopping cart abandonment
- Trial chatbots to provide quicker customer service
Pricing: Plans depend on business size, subscription length, and whether it’s full-stack or web. Optimizely doesn’t disclose their pricing on their site, so businesses need to contact them directly.
Best for: Ecommerce business owners who want to trial new techniques to optimize their site experience.
Crazy Egg
Crazy Egg is a user-friendly ecommerce analytics tool that gives users easy to digest data and dashboards. The ecommerce software encourages businesses to consider every visitor to be a potential customer to help you build a better overall online experience.
Crazy Egg’s top features include:
- Heatmaps showing which parts of your site are receiving visitor attention and which sections are ignored
- Scrollmap tool that shows if your CTA buttons are in the right place
- Site recordings that show the entire user experience from the moment someone clicks on a page to when they leave. Review each visitor’s cursor movements along with everything they click on
- A/B testing tool to help visualize any possible changes to the site
Pricing: From $24 per month based on annual billing.
Best for: Ecommerce businesses that want to track customer moves and see how visitors interact with their site to optimize their conversion rate.
Google Analytics
Price: Free
Google Analytics is the most widely-used analytics tool on the market. If you don’t yet have tracking installed on your site, this should be your starting point.
It provides in-depth information on your site’s traffic, including how your visitors find you, which pages they visit, how long they stay, and much more. This data is useful for any site owner and helps you learn more about your customers and how to reach them more effectively.
For ecommerce marketers, conversion tracking data is particularly valuable.
When integrated with your site’s ecommerce platform, you can use Google Analytics to track all of the sales on your site.
You can see where these customers come from, which of your other marketing channels they’ve contacted (like PPC ads or an email newsletter), and which pages they visited on your site before converting.
Then, you can use all of this information to improve your marketing strategy moving forward.
And best of all? It’s completely free.
Piwik
Price: Free
Piwik is a free web analytics platform and offers many of the same features as Google Analytics. The main difference between the two is that unlike Google Analytics, which is accessible through your browser, Piwik requires users to download the software and install it on your own servers.
Once installed, you can use it to track all of your ecommerce conversions, as well as any other goals you’ve set up on your site. You can also monitor multiple sites at once, set up custom dashboards, and watch a real-time flow of visitors to your site.
If you’re limited on time – or simply forget to check your analytics data regularly – you can also benefit from their automated email reports feature.
Simply select the data you want, set a schedule, and you’ll receive reports right in your inbox every day or week.
KISSmetrics
If you are looking for a comprehensive ecommerce analytics solution, then KISSmetrics should really be your first stop. The company offers a powerful analytics tool that provides really good information that helps you increase customer acquisition and retention rates. Through the very detailed information presented, you can make better decisions on not only the layout but also the marketing of your online store.
RetentionGrid
Another analytics software that is almost always mentioned in the same sentence KISSmetrics is RetentionGrid. What’s great about RetentionGrid is the fact it provides the data in easy to understand color-coded graphs, furthermore, they provide suggestions on how to best reach the different segments, in other words, what kind of marketing works best as well as which campaigns will have the best results depending on who your visitors are.
Glew.io
Glew.io is one of the most comprehensive ecommerce analytics tools available today, making it a good choice for both smaller ecommerce businesses and larger ones.
Using Glew.io ecommerce tools you can:
- Review your top-selling products and differentiate them from products that generate less profit
- Configure Glew.io to track sales from multiple retail platforms. For instance, if you sell on Amazon and from your own site, you can see both sets of sales data in one place
- Use advanced customer analytics to target specific customer segments and review what specific customers bought
- Review your site’s marketing performance by pulling data from Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and Instagram Ads
Pricing: From $79 per month for a one year contract.
Best for: Both small and medium ecommerce brands looking for a complete ecommerce analytics tool.
Supermetrics
More of a marketing analytics tool than purely ecommerce software, Supermetrics pulls data from a variety of sources to analyze which campaigns and channels are boosting your conversions and revenue.
- Pull data from Shopify, Facebook Ads, Google Adwords, and other platforms into a data visualization tool or spreadsheet
- Set up automatic data refreshes and scheduled emails so you always have up to date data to review and analyze
Pulling data is usually a time consuming and tedious task – Supermetrics effectively cuts down the time so you can focus on analyzing data, optimizing current initiatives, and planning new marketing campaigns.
For a deeper overview of how Supermetrics works, check out this example of how Geckoboard uses it to pull data from SEMrush into a Google Sheet to power an SEO dashboard.
Pricing: Pricing starts at $39 per month and depends on the preferred data visualization tool.
Best for: Ecommerce businesses that want to figure out if their marketing strategy is effectively driving revenue.
Woopra
Abandoned orders are every ecommerce business owner’s nightmare. With an average abandonment rate of 70%, cart abandonment affects all ecommerce businesses.
Woopra’s analytics features concentrate on shopping success and lowering cart abandonment rates.
- Find out how long it takes the average customer to buy
- Identify different drop off points throughout the sales funnel
- Review abandonment rates in different situations like adding payment details or selecting shipping so you know which area of your site needs the most work
Mixpanel
Price: $150 – $2,000/month
Mixpanel is similar to Kissmetrics in that it allows you to look at your site in terms of sales funnels and focus on conversions. It also provides advanced features for mobile and app tracking.
One of the main advantages of Mixpanel is that it allows for advanced segmentation in reports. Although this requires some developer experience, it allows you to segment customers beyond standard ecommerce reports and view your data exactly how you want.
It’s worth noting, however, that their pricing model is based on “data points,” or visitor actions on your site.
These points are counted every time a visitor leaves a comment, adds an item to their cart, or takes another step towards conversion, meaning that the more successful your store becomes, the more expensive tracking will get.
Crazy Egg
Price: $9 – 99/month
Although Crazy Egg isn’t a traditional analytics platform, I’m including it in this list because it’s another valuable tool for collecting visitor data.
You can use their heat mapping tools to see user behavior on your pages, like clicks and scrolls. This means that beyond basic analytics data on what actions your visitors take on a page, you’ll see exactly which content impacts their decisions.
You can also use their “confetti” feature to see clicks in different colors based on their referral source. This allows you to get an even more in-depth understanding of your visitors and how they respond to your site based on how they found it in the first place.
Visual Website Optimizer
Price: $49 – 999/month
Visual Website Optimizer is an A/B testing tool you can use to optimize your ecommerce site for conversions.
If you’re unfamiliar with A/B testing, it involves creating multiple versions of a webpage and alternates the versions visitors see. Once you’ve run the tests long enough to collect significant data, you can determine which version produces the higher conversion rate.
There are many elements can you test on your ecommerce site, including colors, layout, images, promotions, calls to action, and your checkout process.
When you run these tests and implement their results, you improve your site’s overall success – and get a better understanding of what your visitors find compelling in the process.
Knowing the analytics tools for e-commerce is only half of the battle. The other part involves harnessing those tools to unleash your website’s potential.
Metrilo
Metrilo is an actionable analytics platform that comes with not only analytics but an integrated CRM and automated email marketing systems. This allows you to look at reports, and act upon them straight away.
The tool also comes with a Retention analysis, which can help you understand your customer lifecycle and it can also help you send out marketing material at the right time and can help you turn one time buyers into loyals- a feature that’s rare in usual analytics solutions.
In short, Metrilo gives you eCommerce analytics that will help you fine-tune your marketing activities and boost sales.
Also, Metrilo integrates well with WooCommerce, Magento, and Shopify and syncs historical data, which means once you integrate, it would feel just like you’ve had Metrilo all along. Nifty, huh?
Examples of Actionable Ecommerce Metrics
Every store is different and has its own specific requirements, but the following examples are relevant to any ecommerce business that sells a product:
- Conversion rate: usually refers to the percentage of visitors to your store that end up making a purchase, with average ecommerce conversion rates in ecommerce hovering around the 1-2% mark. Aside from sales, conversion rates can also apply to any action that you want a customer to take, from signing up to an email list to clicking on a specific link. For more on ecommerce email marketing conversion rates, click here.
- Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): finds out how much you spend for each new customer you acquire. Having a clear picture of this data helps you to optimize your advertising expenses and lower your CAC.
- Visits and bounce percentage: tells you how many visitors you’re attracting and from which source, as well as showing when users are leaving your site quickly. Knowing this can help you test different content and designs to keep users engaged and on your site.
- Average order value (AOV): shows how much people are spending when making a purchase. This helps you to gauge what kind of return you’re getting on your various marketing efforts.
- Cart abandonment rate: shows the percentage of shoppers that are adding a product to their cart and then leaving your store without making a purchase. With 70% of carts abandoned on average, this is an unavoidable phenomenon, but knowing your rates can help you optimize and streamline your checkout process and initiate actions to recapture these lost sales.
Of course, these are just a few of the many key ecommerce metrics you can measure for your store. You should also be keeping a close eye on things like ROI, social media performance, navigation flow, and much more.
Conclusion:
Ecommerce reporting software is a software package that helps ecommerce stores to collect, organize and process their orders and sales data. It usually comes as a part of an ecommerce solution but can stand on its own as well. As online businesses are essentially data-driven, ecommerce reporting software is especially important for these companies as it allows them to analyze their performance and get insights into their customers’ behavior.
If you run an ecommerce website you want to know how well it is performing. There are countless strategies that we can use to improve our conversion rates — some being more difficult than others. Ecommerce tracking tools are a great way to analyze your website, determine what is working and what isn’t, and fix it.