The Critical “Missing Piece” of the Ecommerce Growth Puzzle

Growing an ecommerce store is like putting together a puzzle with four critical pieces:

1. You need to generate high-quality visitors
2. You need to capture and nurture leads
3. You need effective ecommerce best practices and automated marketing follow up to convert your leads and visitors into paying customers
4. You need accurate insight into exactly how well each piece of your marketing process is working so you know what levers to pull to scale your business.

Unless you have all four pieces, you’re not going to be able to successfully grow. Almost all small ecommerce stores are completely missing piece #4. They don’t have “accurate insight into how each piece of their marketing processes are performing” so they’re guessing at how to grow. They are experimenting rather than executing on a data-driven plan.

Worse, they may be misled by the little data they have. This is because they’re often relying on reporting provided by Facebook, Google, and email marketing providers…

The big problem with paid ad reports no one is talking about

Many people aren’t aware there are major problems with the reports they’re using to monitor and optimize their ads:

• Facebook and Google give you a conversion count, but don’t tell you how much actual revenue each ad is producing from those conversions. This can lead to undervaluing certain ads and overvaluing others. You have to know the revenue an ad creates to know how much you can spend on it and still be profitable. A simple conversion count doesn’t begin to provide this insight.
• It’s in Facebook and Google’s interest to take credit for as many sales as possible — regardless of whether they were actually the last click that converted the customer. Facebook and Google have no way of knowing if the last click was from an email campaign you sent out, a referral link someone gave out, etc. But, you can be sure they are going to claim those conversions as driven by them if the person was recently exposed to an ad. This can lead to overvaluing your Facebook and Google ads and undervaluing other aspects of your marketing process.
• Their reporting is limited to a window of time so you can’t tell how many orders were made over the lifetime of the customer or what the total value of those orders is. That’s an absolutely critical piece of information for optimizing your ad spend. Repeat purchases and subscriptions are just lost, never attributed to the original ad that created the customer. An ad might not bring in a lot of revenue on the first purchase, but if it brings in high-value customers that make many repeat purchases, it might return an extremely positive ROI over the long-term. First purchase revenue can’t convey this.

When it comes to email marketing, marketing automation, and lead nurture data, it’s even worse. Many ecommerce stores rely on ActiveCampaign, Drip, MailChimp, etc.’s reporting to tell them how their campaigns are performing. Those solutions do a great job of telling you opens and clickthroughs, but not revenue produced.

For most ecommerce stores, automated follow up is a black hole of insight. They have a vague sense it’s working, but they can’t attribute sales to a particular campaign or follow up sequence.

The solution is people-based revenue attribution

The key to nailing down puzzle piece #4 is tying together each click on an ad, each clickthrough from an email, each click on a tweet, each touch in the customer journey to:

Actual customers
… and their actual orders…
… and the revenue created from those orders…
… over the entire lifetime of the customer.

That’s the holy grail. Having that data is like have a super power — it’s like having x-ray vision for your marketing. You can see exactly what’s working and what isn’t. You know what levers to pull and when to pull them. You see how it all fits together to create awareness, leads, customers, and repeat purchases for your ecommerce store.

You’re no longer flying blind or relying on incomplete, misleading data. You know that this particular Facebook ad generates $20,000 so you can spend up to $19,999 to still be profitable.

You can see that a particular email campaign is generating thousands of clicks but very few sales so you can remove it from your automated follow up, split test it, or hunt down the issue causing the low conversion.

You can see that your best customers are coming from a specific Adwords ad so that you can invest more into it and reverse engineer it to find more of those high lifetime value customers.

Data science for your small business

Large ecommerce stores like Amazon.com and Wal-Mart.com have data science teams they can rely on to maintain databases, run queries, and crunch the numbers on command. The answer to every question is served up on a silver platter.

But, what about you, a small business?

You can’t afford a data science team and most marketing attribution and analytics solutions are either prohibitively expensive or prohibitively difficult to set up and use.

Are you just forced to rely on the incomplete reporting of Facebook, Google, and your email marketing solution?

Wicked Reports was built for small, growing ecommerce stores like yours. With our one-click integrations, you simply authorize your ad accounts, your email marketing solution, and your ecommerce solution. After that, the data starts pouring in. There’s no need for a programmer.

Using people-based tracking, Wicked Reports ties clicks to actual people and their orders so that you know exactly how much revenue each specific ad and email campaign is generating over time. You’ll know the real ROI of each ad.

Then, we tie that data to the customer lifecycle so you know what ads are working to generate awareness, which ones are creating leads, which ones are creating customers, and which ones are creating repeat customers.

Check out more The 3 new truths of e-commerce marketing