Five Great Tips on How to Use eCommerce Analytics to Understand Your Audience

Long-term eCommerce success depends on your ability to gather, interpret, and transform relevant data into actionable tactics and strategies. Simply put, the eCommerce industry has become an overly competitive place, and with the market value expected to reach US $5.88 trillion by 2025, online stores need to focus on bringing more value to customers in order to stay ahead.

Why? Because bringing value to your customers is what will set you apart from the rest and entice people to switch from being one-off buyers to lifelong brand followers and advocates. And as we all know, real eCommerce success lies in repeat purchases and customer retention.

With that in mind, today we are going to analyze the ways you can use eCommerce analytics and key data points to get to know your audience and leverage that data to maximize your store’s potential in 2022 and beyond. 

Combine Sources of Engagement Analytics

Digital marketers are nowadays creating omnichannel campaigns that aim to optimize all customer touchpoints and create a unified brand experience across the web. From your PPC campaigns to your social media ads and content, all the way to your website and other data sources, there are numerous touchpoints you can use to gauge engagement and analyze your audience.

Consider how your audience is interacting with your brand and your marketing and sales messaging on different channels and touchpoints. On social media, you need to pool data from your ads and the content you publish, but also from your DMs, comment sections, and interactions.

Together, these data points will give you a clearer picture of your social media engagement, but most importantly, how and why people get prompted to engage with your brand. Apply this principle to all touchpoints for detailed eCommerce analytics and insights that will help you understand your audience and what inspires them to interact with your brands, but also other brands in your niche.

Track Your Visitors to Create Heat Maps

On your website, you want to gather as much data passively as you can. You also need to leverage active data collection with ratings, surveys, testimonials, and other direct feedback tools. The data you collect passively will give you an unbiased insight into user behavior.

You want to understand how people are using your website, why they’re sticking around, and where they spend most of their time vs where they decide to drop out or where their attention starts to wane. When you have that information, you can create heat maps that will allow you to build a better user experience on your website.

For example, some of the best Shopify apps out there focus on passive data collection for fraud prevention and user analytics, while others focus on smart product recommendations based on user behavior. You can integrate various apps and trackers, and use them along with your website cookies to get a clearer picture of how visitors are using your website.

Then, you can create detailed website heat maps and user behavior reports to make data-driven decisions on how to improve the various aspects of your online store.

Monitor Checkout Behavior and Performance

There are many steps that lead to a successful checkout. You need to optimize the entire customer journey to guide customers from awareness to conversion and then loyalty, but one of the key elements in that process is simplicity. Simplicity in shopping, cart management, and the overall reduction of customer effort.

To reduce customer effort as much as possible and build customer loyalty in eCommerce through a positive shopping experience, you need to monitor checkout behavior and use that data to improve the process. This will involve your typical metrics such as the percentage of people who complete a purchase or the percentage of people who add items to their carts.

But more importantly, you should monitor those subtle behaviors, like the time it takes people to complete a purchase or how quickly they back out of a sale. Take a look at your heat map to see where people stick around the most. 

You might find that they linger on the shipping options and costs before backing out, which is a clear indicator that you need to improve your shipping to incentivize more conversions.

Use Digital Fingerprinting to Identify Your Audience

As we already mentioned, passive data collection is important for audience research and for getting to know your website visitors. Luckily, you can use your website’s cookies but also integrate various data-collection and fingerprinting apps to identify people on your site and learn more about them.

You can use this to identify the visitor’s internet service provider, the browser they’re using, their location and device they’re accessing your site from, as well as minute details such as their operating system, screen orientation, and more. Digital marketing agencies will regularly include these data points in their eCommerce reporting for their clients in order to provide as much useful data as possible, and it’s important that you gather this data yourself as well.

You can use it to build much more detailed buyer personas and take your marketing and sales to the next level.

Monitor Repeat Customers and Optimize Retargeting 

As you already know, the key to long-term eCommerce success lies in repeat conversions and customer retention. People who have already bought something from you are much more likely to make another purchase, and this is your opportunity to deliver a better overall experience and entice them to keep coming back to your store.

To that end, you need to keep up with the trending products to sell online in your niche and weave them into your personalized offerings, based on the individual’s browsing and purchasing history. These need to be up-sell and cross-sell products, as well as trending products from different categories within their scope of interest. 

Be sure to monitor the behavior of your repeat customers, their interests, and drivers, and use that information to improve retargeting with value-driven offers, messaging, and personalized experiences. 

Over to You

These insights will be invaluable in identifying common pain points and desires so that you can optimize and improve all customer touchpoints for a better, more rewarding experience. The result will be a customer who will want to come back to your store regularly to make yet another purchase.