Running an e-commerce business is tough. You pour your heart into crafting the perfect products, building a beautiful website, and running compelling marketing campaigns. So many moving pieces require precise coordination in digital e-commerce, but at some point, you will be faced with making data-backed choices to level up.
But how do you make data-driven decisions that truly propel growth when talking about using e-commerce marketing analytics? You need to sift through the noise of vanity metrics and biased platform data. Deep down inside though you can build for growth when focused on leveraging the right marketing analytics.
Accuracy in E-commerce Marketing Analytics
Your data must be based on actual leads and sales. Having visibility across the entire customer journey, including the first touch, last touch, and the various marketing channels, is ideal, though.
Top-of-funnel marketing often gets undervalued, with all the credit going to the last click. But the truth is the early stages where awareness and consideration is built have become important in the buying journey. To solve that, we created Wicked Reports, a way to follow the buyers process.
Transparent Attribution
It’s about seeing clearly how credit is assigned for each sale. It's acknowledging that a customer's path to purchase isn't a straight line. You can even try this method of using predictive analytics, as shared on the Intero Digital blog.
It involves multiple touchpoints across different channels. Imagine a customer discovering your product through a social media ad, then reading your blog post, and later signing up for your email marketing list. A transparent system accounts for those early touches to make it a buying consideration.
Customer Journey Visibility
Having the right level of customer tracking data is crucial. Your analytics should show you more than just the final interaction before a purchase. The best marketers factor those middle funnels engagements that contribute to conversion.
This helps avoid those tools that are out to manipulate numbers and data. For example, the importance of testing is highlighted for today's online retail world. This kind of openness lets everyone on the team understand what’s working, and where customers might be stumbling in e-commerce marketing.
Selecting the Right Metrics
Think of launching a marketing campaign like hiring someone for a specific job. Each campaign has a different role, much like on a sports team.
It could be finding new customers. You also might need to drive a higher volume of traffic and move people to other owned media. Each type of funnel plays a role in getting qualified leads.
Different Metrics for Different Goals
The way you evaluate success depends on the job at hand. When you measure data analytics, factor the goals first before labeling data and campaign ROI incorrectly. Consider what e-commerce marketing success looks like in this scenario.
Say your marketing team runs social media ads and Google paid ads. Both platforms tell you things are good because the ROI is trending up over last year and sales data matches the trend. But those paid tools do not properly assess each step of the customer acquisition, thus creating a reporting problem.
Here's a table that covers using the right approach depending on marketing objectives.
| Marketing Objective | Relevant Metrics | How to Measure |
|---|---|---|
| Find new customers | New visits, New visit percentage, Bounce Rate | Track the number of unique visitors and the percentage of total traffic they represent. |
| Engage leads | Pages per visit, Click Through Rate, Returning Visitors | Look at the depth of engagement metrics. |
| Close sales | Conversion rate, Average Order Value, Cart Abandonment Rate | Track percentage of sales converted and monetary value, compared to your goal and over previous timeframes. |
Using e-commerce metrics helps understand how well your online store is performing.
Real World Scenario - A Football Game
Let’s say a football team wins a game 41-38. Success is ultimately measured by the final score.
Digging deeper, the offense gets a win too by putting so many points on the board. However, that score on defense has some issues and has the potential to fail down the road.
The offensive metric of scoring 41 points is great, while the defensive metric of giving up 38 points is worrisome. So while the overarching "did you get a sale or not?" remains a metric in digital marketing funnels, you do have many ways of interpreting results.
Automating for Growth with E-Commerce Marketing Analytics
You set up rules to decide ahead of time. When the numbers meet a benchmark you pick, the next steps happen automatically. Automation, like shared from marketing analytics research, keeps it consistent with all of the customer's journey included.
With systems and e-commerce marketing analytics combined, all data is set before an advertising is deployed, leading to more consistency in your analysis. If things dip, have a "check engine light" for you to consider options or make changes. It is similar to seeing metrics trend up in value, you want alerts set to take faster advantage.
Establishing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
You might decide that if a Facebook ad campaign is trending for 3 days in a row in total sales value, then increase the ad budget by X percentage automatically. Those are types of options when you establish your KPI before hand. These aren’t random goals but carefully selected numbers based on your business objectives.
KPIs should reflect what really matters to your growth. A rule might state, when a YouTube ad generates 5 leads at a cost below the projected amount of the Cost-per-lead (CPL), automatically reinvest earnings towards scaling the audience targeting. Those types of automation steps become much easier to handle.
Agreeing on Measurement
You need to know your LTV (lifetime value) to establish your goals in customer tracking. Deciding which data source to use requires testing as well, since different tracking platforms do things their own way. By finding and testing things that can show long-term impacts, the bigger the impact on your results.
Customer retention is a big factor with that too. Keep tabs on the retention rate to understand how well you are connecting with customers.
Automating Marketing Decisions
Automating can go a long ways, beyond having it "done for you" from time savings. This approach removes the need for constant manual checks.
Automation ensures decisions are always data-driven. It helps maintain objectivity. Data from different periods gets looked at using the same rules, so everyone agrees it’s right.
Using marketing automation in this way helps analyze customer behavior too. Marketing efforts get optimized.
Conclusion
Getting e-commerce marketing analytics right involves focusing on three critical factors. Accurate customer tracking data offers transparency to create more wins from more relevant customer experiences.
You have the advantage with so much competition these days when applying sound automation into the business strategy. Analyzing data in this way helps with making informed decisions too. Marketing platforms change rules of reporting without notice often, and its great to always get an accurate representation of the numbers no matter what changes are applied.
Automating and aligning key performance indicators is a good path too. You want to optimize pricing and improve the user experience the best you can. Understanding these things is how to get data to increase sales and make more profit.
