Web Analytics and Important KPIs for E-commerce Businesses in 2020

We all want to know how our website performs after launching. This is where web analytics tools become useful in the first place. Modern web analytics covers everything from advanced data science to sophisticated segmentation.

At present time, the need for real-time web analytics data has increased amongst businesses. The role of data in daily business operations and decision-making has expanded. The web remains at the core of most digital marketing practices. That’s why web analytics is as important as ever.

Reports are no longer enough. Taking advantage of the usefulness of web analytics, monitoring interaction is crucial. Businesses must monitor traffic sources, content efficiency, & customer journey.

The right information comes from collecting and understanding data from the web. In addition, organizations will continue to develop these trends in 2020 and beyond.

What is Web Analytics?

Web Analytics is a computer tool. It helps eCommerce sellers collect, measure, and analyze web data to improve performance. Web analytics enables you to determine:

• Search intent of visitors – Find out the Keyword Terms or Search Queries used while finding your website or content.
• Visitor’s profile- Find out the demographics particular to your website and other information related to the user.
• Session duration – Keep an eye on the duration for which users stay on your site.
• No. of Visits – See how many visits a user pays to your site for a specific time period.
• Website Content Interactions – Web Analytics can tell you which exact pages that users are interacting with.

Basics of how web analytics work

When visitors visit your website, they download web pages from your web server to view them in a browser. You need to install or place some code on your website. Earlier websites used sophisticated software on a webserver to interpret traffic.

Notably, this was very laborious and exhausted the resources of the web server. Now, there are analytics tools that can handle operations. There are free and paid tools that display data in different ways.

Let us look at Google Analytics (GA). It is a free and popular choice for anyone using web analytics.GA is a website analysis tool that gives you an in-depth overview of the performance of your website. From Search Console to Ads and Data Studio.

It will record data and measure performance through digital media. With Google page analytics, you can view a variety of behaviors and interactions.

Google Analytics metrics and dimensions

You must understand the dimensions and metrics to use Google Analytics.

Metrics: quantitative variable. Examples are Session, Duration, page views, time on page, bounce rate, etc.

Dimensions: categorical variable. Examples are colors, names, and locations.

Google Analytics Real-Time Reporting

Real-time web analytics reports provide user behavior information on the current site. It is a good habit to inspect your Google traffic report daily. In short, this will enhance your understanding of your audience. In the overview, you will see
 

Audiences

Acquisition

Behavior

 Conversions

Common features of Google Analytics and other analytics tools?

There are different web analytics tools available for website owners. Each of them has features that make them unique. Certain software functions that are correct and centralized will help you.

Standard analytics reports can contain four main categories. Ecommerce goals, visitors, referrers, and actions. But we can categorize these reports further as follows:

1. Dashboard for all sites
Know and learn what’s happening on your websites at once.

2. Geolocation
Find your visitors to track countries, regions, cities, or organizations with accuracy. View visitor statistics by country, region, or city on a world map. See your latest visitors in real time.

3. Real-time data updates
You can view the flow of visits to your site in real-time. Learn more about visitors and the pages they visit.

4. Customizable board
Here, you can create a dashboard with widget settings that meet your needs.

5. Website search analytics
Track searches performed on internal search engines.

6. Analytical activity tracking
Follow your newsletters, or any personalized ads like Google ads, Facebook ads. Set campaign parameters, URLs and more in GA.

7. Custom dimensions
Assign any custom data to predetermined action parameters. For example, clicks, downloads, etc.

8. Website and Page Speed ​​Report
See how fast your site is delivering content to visitors.

9. Page transitions
See what visitors are doing before and after a particular page.

10. Tracking Content
Measure the click-through rates and the number of impressions. You can select the pages that are most relevant for you to track.

11. Row Statistics
Current and past statistics for any row in any report.

12. Follow different user interactions
Automatic file download detection, click on external site links, optional 404-page tracking.

13. Custom variable
Custom dimensions: You can use the JavaScript tracking API to assign custom events. Name/value to visitors or pages and then view reports on visits, conversions, and more. For each custom variable.

14. Page Layout
You can display statistics at the top of your website.

15. Keep an eye on search engine traffic
There are different search engines. Measuring how long your visitors spend on your site (this allows you to measure bounce rate). Scheduled email reports (PDF and HTML reports)

16. E-commerce analysis
With advanced e-commerce analytics, you can find out what’s working on your site. Also, you can understand what’s not working and improve that section.

17. Tracking goal conversion 
Follow the goals and determine if you meet your current business goals. We can track actions taken by creating actionable events. This could include, A specific URL click or page title and duration for which visitor stays on the site.

18. Visitor registration
The visitor profile helps you understand the behavior of each user. It also provides a detailed summary of all the visits.

19. Event tracking
Assess any user interactions you have on websites and applications.

To optimize your e-commerce website and increase revenue, you must track various KPIs. Generally, try to attribute KPIs to continuous user behavior in the sales funnel.  ?

These are e-commerce Web analytics KPIs you must track using web analytics.

1. E-commerce conversion rate

An idea of how effective the site is in converting traffic into meaningful actions. Yet, setting eCommerce goals is a bit different from goal-based conversions. First, make sure that e-commerce tracking is active on your website. Otherwise, you need to follow Google’s instructions for setting up e-commerce detection. 

2. Average cart value

The KPI here represents the average amount spent per order on each platform on the online store. To calculate the average cart value, divide the turnover by the number of orders placed in a given period.

3. Cart abandonment rate

This metric represents website visitors who are close to purchases and then disappear. If you can determine why users are unable to complete a transaction. Then, you can improve your website so that more buyers become customers. This is often a more useful goal than focusing on driving more traffic.

Shoppers who add products to their shopping cart are potential clients. You can then try to convert the interest of your existing sales. Use the HumCommerce tool to get information about revenue in abandoned carts.

4. Customer Acquisition Cost

This informs you how much your company has spent acquiring new customers. This is possible by looking at your marketing spend and how each customer was acquired.

5. Subscriber growth rate

This shows you how fast your subscriber list is growing. Linking this KPI to the total number of subscribers gives you a good idea of the channel.

6. Audience data

Using this, one can check visitors’ demographics and behaviors. It has many factors to choose from, like new vs returning, frequency, and engagement. It offers a wide range of information like the technology used and operating system.  Use the information obtained to improve visitor traffic to improve your website.

Understand the type of technology used to access the site or the number of mobile visitors. Learn about your industry cycle by monitoring high-traffic days, weeks, and months. You can research large amounts of data and use it to view your audience.

7. Quality of product reviews

The number and content of product reviews are essential KPIs to look into. Product reviews are great for social proof and authority. It can help you with SEO and provide quality feedback to your business.

Web analytics best practices for 2020 and beyond:

1. Information Accuracy
There are many ways we want to get information. Always generate relevant information with the data. You will miss the point if no insights are linking your data with business goals.

Make your data relevant and meaningful by showing the impact of your site data. When reporting to stakeholders, state the areas of success and improvement. Capture specific customer identification (such as email or username) as soon as possible. And then use it to reintegrate customer data.

2. A place to share ideas and success
Proper analytics is only useful when used to improve performance. Successful organizations will organize a round table of users or business analysts. To share achievements and suggestions to improve metrics. This is usually done in a functional area, such as merchandise or marketing.

It also helps analytics managers understand how business users use data. Also, you can help share successful experiences with your manager. Providing support for other analytical resources and projects. Creating a document repository for shared analytics is essential.

3. Complete data
Wrong data is the worst. The reason is that incorrect data can lead you in the wrong direction and lead to bad advice. I recommend you plan (implemented early) to define all necessary information.

Don’t be afraid to collect data and target visitors outside of Web Analytics tools. In the area of business intelligence, there are many other suitable tools available, especially for this purpose. About the integrity of the data, make sure that all tags are active. Also, check the content and pages you wish to track & optimize them if required.

4. Give each page a unique name
This is one of the most overlooked practices but also one of the most important. If we don’t give each page a unique name, you will save the original URL. That is not useful for generating reports. At the very least, you need to separate the URL into different sections and store them as separate data. This can be helpful when generating reports.

And to understand which parts of your website are most popular. Furthermore, you can define more data, such as the category of the page (e.g., personal, business, loan, credit card) and page type (e.g., static content, dynamic content, application form, generation of potential customers, etc.). When it comes to reporting, everything gives us more information and ways to cut data.

Coding the date of the most important event in the variables of the analytics solution. This way, you can create segments based on important dates, which is not possible in most solutions.

5. Good documentation
A quality data dictionary will define all important variables and warnings. What is the definition of income? Does this include gift cards or discounts? This is useful for your team. It will take them to have confidence in the data and know-how to interpret it. It should be understandable for them.

A data dictionary is usually a variable-by-variable manual. It explains what each variable captures and its usefulness. No implementation is perfect. So, you want to tag a variable with incomplete data or call any warnings, such as the date of the issue of the variable.

Analyzing events calendars helps analysts understand data differences that are due to sales events and code changes. Also, we recommend that you provide your business partners with a file.  A file that contains links to data dictionaries and other related documents.

6. Ease a data-based decision environment
Collect relevant information to answer whether you have achieved your goals or not. This will develop methods to improve KPIs. Is there high-value content based on user reviews on the site without traffic?

Find out why you should analyze the users’ route or analyze the participation. Use experimental and testing tools to try different solutions. Find the best place to generate the most engagement on this page.

Conclusion

Needs for real-time and near-real-time web analytics has increased with developing technology. We covered certain tips for optimizing your e-commerce website and increasing revenue. You must measure and track various KPIs that we covered here. The role of data in daily business operations and decision-making has expanded.

Web analytics provides information about marketing activities. Also, it will help us understand which marketing strategy is best. You will need to install it on your website or visit a web analytics platform. Marketing experts need to understand analytical strategy and resources. Try the HumCommerce tool and web analytics. Click here. 

Write to us if you have any suggestions in the comments section. We will be happy to include it in the existing information if found relevant. Thanks