Last updated - December 11, 2023
To increase sales on your eCommerce platform, it’s vital to leverage data in understanding consumers. Conducting frequent eCommerce data analytics keeps you in the know. A characteristic of the 21st century is; consumer behavior changes frequently. Hence, you can’t trust yesterday’s insight in today’s decision-making.
Whether you are a business owner or a marketer, it becomes imperative that you spend time delving deep into facts, figures, and insights. Without excellent eCommerce data analytics, your business won’t take the proper steps. Hence, you must understand how to use eCommerce data analytics in growing your business.
What is eCommerce data and analysis?
Ecommerce is the basic process of exchanging goods and services online. The internet’s vastness in terms of tools, range, resources, innovation, etc., facilitates business transactions. These business transactions can be between two businesses (B2B) or between businesses and their customers (B2C).
To this effect, eCommerce data is the data acquired whenever consumers or clients of your business make purchases or take related actions on any of your platforms.
Ecommerce data analytics then involves gathering data from your business’ different platforms to understand consumer behavior and trends. As an eCommerce business, analytics should be the core of every decision-making. It’s advisable to use a report maker to clearly separate and present different sets of data. Ecommerce data analytics you prioritize should span the whole consumer journey – from discovery to acquisition, conversion, retention, and advocacy.
What type of data does eCommerce use?
As an eCommerce business, the following data types will be vital to the different marketing strategies your company wants to leverage.
Audience Data
Knowing your market is the very basis of every data analytics effort. Also, knowing your audience is vital irrespective of the marketing strategy you’re looking to employ. For the audience type of data, the focus hovers on analytical elements like gender, occupation, age, language, residence, income, etc.
It’s also essential to have insight into devices consumers access your platform with. Knowledge of access points will help you design experiences better. Knowing your audience also influences the shipping process, advertisement, product offerings, etc.
Acquisition Data
Acquisition data also play an essential role in the growth of your business. Knowing where and how your audience found you forces you to focus on particular onboarding platforms. Acquisition data also gives direction to your marketing efforts. Doubling down on the media that generate traffic and sales is an excellent idea.
Behavioral Data
Even users don’t understand their behaviors online. No user consciously thinks of that. However, as a business owner, you should be one step ahead by knowing what your consumers do on your platform. You should know what page they click on first? What do they buy? What products are they interested in but not buying? Etc.
Conversion Data
The primary purpose of marketing for an eCommerce business is conversion. Your business needs the highest conversion rate possible per quarter. Hence, it’s pertinent to follow and study just how customers get converted on your platform. It would help if you understood when and why. You should know what part of your platform converts them and how frequently does that area work. Know every detail possible.
Paid Marketing Data
There are many preachers against paid marketing. However, it comes with its perks. Paid marketing leverages the audience reach and resources of larger platforms. Whenever your business conducts paid marketing, it’s essential to know what works, how, when, why, etc.
How to collect eCommerce data?
Collecting eCommerce data can be a long but rewarding process. Here’s how you can collect eCommerce data:
- Setup collection procedures and infrastructure across multiple channels
- Collect data from your website’s database
- Website scrapping
- Social Media insights
- Surveys
- Email marketing
- CRM data
- Data purchase from vendors
Beyond the collection, you should figure out how company data can help reach goals per time.
How to build a scalable eCommerce data model?
Data analytics for businesses requires a lot of planning. The bulk of work your business has to do with data involves optimizing for the future. From collection to storage, enrichment, and usage, handling data requires due diligence. Hence, it’s best to establish a data model that can scale right from the outset. Journey through how you can build a scalable data model for your business.
Understanding Your Customers
‘Understanding your customers’ sounds cliché for every business. However, it’s easy to be in the pitfall of thinking your know who your customers are without knowing. It’s imperative to know who is buying from you and where you can find more of them. Having this basic groundwork done is essential.
Understanding and Optimize Product Listing and Cataloging
Ensure that products are listed in accessible and alluring formats. Leveraging design thinking in your presentation and offerings opens you more to fundamental consumer behavior insights. The ripple effect is also felt in other aspects of your business. When making these optimization efforts, ensure that the tiniest details are being tracked.
Order Processing
Ecommerce is heavily premised on receiving and fulfilling orders. Hence, it’s essential to design your data model intuitively through the order journey. You need insights on when orders are made, the orders that get canceled, the order confirmation email stats, active carts, etc. Know everything about orders for your product.
How eCommerce data analytics can grow your business?
You can’t overemphasize the importance of data analytics to your eCommerce business. The following benefits are bound to stem from adequately executed data analytics:
- Understanding your customers’ location and needs
- Understanding your most effective marketing strategies
- Understanding how to better segment and target customers
Conclusion
Ecommerce data analysis done right opens your business up to opportunities that are easy to miss. Hence, as much as you can, invest in data collection and leverage.
