You already have Best ecommerce analytics software for your business. There are so many benefits of using this software to grow your business! Keyword research tools to help you find the right keywords to put on your website, Easy heatmap to see which content people are interacting with the most on your website, Get more leads for free with our integrated affiliate link tracker.
Quickly understand who your customers are, what they are doing on your site, improve conversion rates with insight based on data, and turn data into action. This is the best ecommerce analytics software for your Shopify store.
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.
GOOGLE ANALYTICS
It’s hard to resist the charm of « free », isn’t it?
Some of the best analytical tools for ecommerce are free thanks to Google. Almost everyone uses Google Analytics, and we recommend that you do the same.
Increasing your ecommerce conversion rate is a big challenge, no matter what you sell. Google’s Enchanced eCommerce provides merchants with a broader view of metrics.
Simply put, the platform is much more powerful than it used to be. Google Analytics users now have the ability to track traffic at every stage of the funnel. This means identifying weaknesses that lead to cart abandonment or friction points in the checkout process. In addition, users can keep a close watch:
- The performance of each product at the sales level (a clue: this helps you, at the same time, to identify your customer’s LTV)
- Where your traffic comes from (desktop, mobile, tablet) and how those visitors are converting.
- On which pages your visitors are spending the most time and on which there is the most bounce.
As you will see Google Analytics can tell you much more than how many visits come to your website each day.
WHY SHOULD I GATHER DATA FROM GOOGLE ANALYTICS?
Google released a video a few years ago on their youtube channel which is still a great example of customer experience flaws in E-commerce. Tongue-in-cheek humour, it explains several obstacles deemed acceptable in E-commerce that we’d never accept in a brick and mortar.
The video takes place in your average grocery store, where a man is trying to purchase a loaf of bread. His checkout experience is anything but smooth, starting off with a rough log-in phase where he can’t remember his account information. He then has to agree to a lengthy agreement which ends up in him “timing out” and you can feel the frustration that the actor expresses as he has to restart the log-in process from zero.
A particularly interesting moment is when the cashier holds up a card with CAPTCHA words written, asking the customer to confirm that he is a “real person.” While it seems absurd in real life, this is a security measure that can be a headache when inexistent characters pop up, or when the CAPTCHA doesn’t display correctly.
After a gruelling authentication experience, he finally gets to the payment phase, where he’s charged nearly 9 times the original price of the item. This seems ridiculous in real life- but we know that surprise charges (including delivery charges) are the #1 reason that customers abandon their carts.
After declining the bizarre “Bread Insurance” fee, the cashier tells him that he can come back in five business days to pick up his loaf of bread. The customer expresses that he needs it now, and the cashier indicates that the “Immediate take-home price” is four times the original price of the bread. Finally, the customer walks away without purchasing anything at all.
While this video has a humorous tone, it highlights several problems concerning customer experience in E-commerce, while showing us at the end that the customer will walk away if confronted with too many obstacles when trying to purchase. While it might be harder to walk away in real life, it’s far easier to do online, and online customers are quick to abandon their purchase at even the slightest obstacle.
HOW DO I SET UP ANALYTICS?
Google Analytics is a tool we’re not shy to sing praises for. It’s the best thing since sliced bread (get it?).
Implementation is fairly simple: you start by making an analytics account linked to a Gmail account. I suggest making a specific Gmail account for your E-commerce in order to link all of your Google tools to the same place (in lieu of connecting it to your personal Gmail account).
From that point, you need to link your “property” (your site) to your Google Analytics account. The site will walk you through the process completely. You will have to choose an industry category as well as your time zone information, and etc. It’s all more or less straightforward.
The next step is to link your Analytics account back to your website. In your Analytics account, you go to Admin >> Account >> Property >> Tracking Info >> Tracking Code.
![[Analytics Video] How do I track hits on my E-commerce?](https://obiztools.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Analytics-500x257.png "[Analytics Video] How do I track hits on my E-commerce?")
You copy your tracking code and you paste it into the HTML of your landing page (before the closing </head> tag). You should paste this code in all sites that you want to track. If you have a dynamic website (a website where the HTML is generated using a programming language such as Python, PHP, etc.) you want to use the PHP shortcode (in the small red square at the bottom).
For sites hosted where you can’t manage the source code, there are usually plugins specific to that hosting site that will link your analytics and your site automatically. Unfortunately, as is often the case, there may be fewer options that you can customize for data tracking.
From there, you can configure your data on the Analytics dashboard. There are loads of little things you can do at this point, like defining the country you want to target, what data you want to appear on your dashboard, and you can even set goals for your analytics to report on. Setting goals are particularly important, as Google will then propose solutions to help reach those goals.
Regardless, this site contains a wealth of information concerning how to configure and set up analytics for your website. If you want to go even further, there is a free online course that Google offers to teach you everything you ever needed to know about Google Analytics and how to interpret your data.
Tracking the hits to your E-commerce site is the first step to shining a light on who your audience is and what they like/don’t like about your site. Data is invaluable, and knowing what makes your customers abandon their purchases is the best way to improve your customer experience.
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.
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.
Conclusion
A powerful yet easy to use ecommerce analytics software suite for ecommerce businesses including eBay sellers, Amazon sellers, online retailers and more.