Ecommerce has been growing at an increasingly rapid rate over the last decade. Once the pandemic began, ecommerce businesses saw exponential growth as many people relied on the internet for basic purchases such as groceries.
As reported on the statistics platform, Statista, the global ecommerce market was worth $4.9 trillion in 2021. This is expected to grow to around $7.4 trillion in just another few years.
Of course, with more businesses heading online, the competition is fierce. Businesses need to put into place effective SEO and digital marketing strategies to be successful.
Online businesses are constantly looking to tweak their websites and increase their traffic volumes. One effective method for doing this is to use analytic tools.
What Are Ecommerce Analytic Tools?
These tools can give website owners valuable insights into their ecommerce business. They are data-driven tools that can help evaluate where problems lie in terms of bounce rates and traffic.
Ecommerce analytic tools can help show business growth and measure progress and performance.
Analytic tools also help to show key performance indicators such as how much revenue is made from each visitor. This is also known as RPV.
Why Do You Need Them?
To be successful in ecommerce you need traffic, and you need conversions. There are numerous analytics tools on the market to help with ecommerce.
For instance, digital marketing automation tools exist to help raise visibility and brand awareness.
Analytic tools are needed if a business owner wants to be able to understand where they need to make improvements.
Without reviewing the data that these tools can give, it will be impossible to understand how much progress a business is making.
Important KPIs are revenue per visitor, conversion rates, and the average spend per customer. These are as follows:
- RPV – This is how much revenue gets created per visitor to the website
- Conversion Rate – This is displayed as a percentage and is the average amount of sales from the total amount of visitors
- AOV – The average order value. The total amount of orders divided by the number of buyers
By using an ecommerce analytic tool, you will be able to gain access to the data needed to improve these KPIs.
How Do You Use Analytic Tools?
Traditional web analytic tools are used to provide certain data and metrics. These would normally include bounce rate, the time spent on a webpage, and how many visitors you have received.
You would also have access to data such as which country your customers reside in, what browser they are using, and what devices they are using.
You can even see what screen resolution your visitors have set on their device too.
This is important data and can be used to see which pages are holding visitors’ interest, and which ones are turning them off.
Bounce rate can affect SERPs, as Google ranks pages on their relevance. A high bounce rate can see a site slip down the search engine’s results pages.
You can take this data and then use it to improve content and layout. One thing this data doesn’t provide though is to give you an insight into the visitor themselves.
Therefore, you may want to add a behavior analytics tool as well. This adds more qualitative data and helps to understand the user’s experience when visiting your site.
You read more in-depth information at the Verfacto blog on many areas of ecommerce analytics, including qualitative data.
The Top 5 Best Marketing Analytic Tools for Ecommerce
So, now you have a brief outline of what ecommerce analytic tools can provide, and what areas they can help you with, it is time to see what is available.
There are literally dozens of analytic tools on the market today, and selecting the best isn’t a straightforward task.
However, here are 5 that are very popular today, and would be suitable for different reasons, and budgets.
Google Analytics
The business and news-driven website, MarketWatch, predicts huge growth in the data analytics market over the next few years. It also lists Google Analytics as one of the biggest players.
Yet, this analytics tool is free to use. It can provide useful insights into the following areas:
- Find problem pages with high bounce rates
- Discover which pages hold value for your visitors
- Locate areas where cart abandonment is highest
- Find out where your visitors are located, and which devices they use
Google Analytics is ideal for anyone who is just venturing into using these tools. There is an enhanced version with more options and another paid-for version.
Google Analytics 360 is the version that comes with access to Google Marketing Platform and all its tools.
However, it costs $150,000 per year so is unlikely to be accessible for small businesses.
Adverity
This platform allows the user to monitor KPIs and see all the important marketing data in real-time.
The platform includes AI-driven predictive analytics and promises to help businesses grow through powerful data insights.
There is no free trial for Adverity, nor is there a free version though. There is a fairly unique pricing system that is designed to make it affordable for smaller businesses.
With Adverity, the user can add which features they require, and leave out others they don’t.
With each feature being priced at $1, the tool can be customized according to the budget available.
Supermetrics
Another very popular platform that can be used to analyze marketing data from a number of sources.
The idea behind Supermetrics is that it automatically pulls data and presents it to you in an easy-to-understand form.
This data can be pulled from areas such as Facebook Ads or from Shopify and is best used to see how successful a marketing campaign is.
Woopra
Every online business suffers from drop-offs during the conversion process. Having carts abandoned is an extremely common occurrence and one that ecommerce businesses are desperate to change.
It is said that around three-quarters of carts are simply abandoned during the check-out process. This tool can help to identify where these drop-off points are so that improvements can be made.
Kissmetrics
This tool covers all the important KPIs such as revenue per visitor and total revenue.
It will display important marketing data such as how many new visitors your site is attracting, and also the conversion rate.
You can see which pages are getting the most impressions, and you will also be able to monitor which products sell the most.
Kissmetrics provides detailed reports that can let a marketing team see where campaigns are working, and what areas of the site need changing.
Summary
There are many tools to help ecommerce today. Social media can be a huge benefit to an ecommerce business, and digital marketing plays a big part in online success.
Data analytics tools are also essential to an ecommerce business owner.
Simply gaining visitors and making sales isn’t enough if a business wants to operate to its potential.
Marketing campaigns need to be analyzed, and websites monitored for problematic areas.
Drop-off points and carts being abandoned needs to be studied. These tools can help a business better understand its customer’s behaviors.
In turn, the improvements made through the use of analytic tools can lead to a better UX and more conversions in the long run.