What is eCommerce marketing analytics?
Marketing analytics represent data culled from your marketing efforts to understand your success in reaching and converting customers. Every action you take produces a result. That result can either be positive or negative. For example, if you send out an email newsletter, a certain percentage of your audience may open it. Looking at the number of people who do, as well as the number of people who take further action based on the contents of your email, are both examples of using analytics.
A basic conceptual understanding of data analysis will enable you to ask better questions, avoid blind spots, and make smarter decisions as you grow your business.
Let's look at the various techniques you can use for your marketing campaign and how to measure their success using analytics.
Behavioral analytics
Behavioral analytics analyzes your users' behavior and activity to improve marketing campaigns, customer experience, and more. Behavioral analytics helps you analyze your customers' purchasing patterns, site performance, and other usage data to make better-informed decisions.
The report will also show how many times a customer has visited your website in a given period (day/week/month). This allows you to identify which users are spending more time interacting with your products or services than others so that you can focus on them for future marketing efforts.
Call-to-Action (CTA)
Calls-to-action (CTAs) are the primary way you convey your value proposition to customers. A CTA is simply an action you ask your visitors to take to get more information or buy your product.
CTAs are essential because they help guide users through the buying process and inform them about what their next step should be for them to complete their journey. They allow customers to quickly assess whether they want what you're offering without digging into lengthy sales copy or complicated user flows—which means more conversions. Keep the best practices below in mind as you're making your own CTAs:
- Don't overwhelm readers with too many choices; three options are ideal
- Don't link directly from your landing page back into a funnel (just use subdomains instead)
- If you include a CTA on a website or within a blog post, try to include it at the end, after you've stated the value proposition for your product or service
In terms of analytics, measuring how many people engage with your CTA goes a long way toward determining how effective it is. If you see subpar conversion rates from your CTA, you may need to adapt it in one way or another. Perhaps you need to create a stronger value proposition or use a more persuasive copy on your CTA.
Related: What eCommerce Cash Flow Management Tools Can Do for Your Business
Click-through rate (CTR)
The click-through rate (CTR) is the number of impressions on an ad divided by the number of people who click on it. It will be one of the key metrics you'll want to analyze as an advertiser because it tells them how effectively their ads get people to click.
Do you have a low CTR? If so, it may be time to address your content strategy or determine if you're unique selling point distinguishes you from your competitors enough. If your CTR is high, you know to continue whatever you've been doing.
Data visualization
Data visualization is the process of creating graphic aids to represent data. These can come in tables, charts, diagrams, or graphs. It helps you to understand your data by showing patterns and trends.
Data visualization can help you make better decisions because you can see how changes in one part of your business affect others. For example, suppose you're trying to improve a landing page's conversion rate. In that case, data visualization can show you that visitors who come from search engines convert at a much lower rate than those who are referred by email or social media. Data visualization also helps communicate this information to others in an understandable way: describing them in words alone would be tedious or even impossible in some cases because there's too much going on at once.
Data visualization isn't data analytics per se; instead, it's a method for presenting your analytics. Remember that when you're telling the story of your marketing campaign, you'll want to do so in the most compelling way possible. Your data is expressed with numbers, but how those numbers are arranged is what tells your real story.
Heat maps
Heat maps are another method for visually representing data. They're often used to identify areas of interest, such as where a user clicks on the page. Heat maps can also identify areas of low interest, which helps determine what parts of your site should be improved for better conversion rates.
Deep linking
Deep linking is a method of linking from one app or platform to another. It's similar to traditional links but deeper: instead of sending users to the homepage of a mobile website, they are sent directly to an in-app page. This allows users to avoid navigating through various pages and sections within an app (which can be time-consuming) while also providing marketers with an opportunity to build brand awareness by promoting content and products across multiple platforms.
The benefit of deep linking is that you can use this single link as a way for customers to return to your website or app and want more information about something specific. Clients can click on it without having to go through any other steps first, making it easier for them to find what they're looking for quickly - and helping them take action faster than ever before.
From an analytics perspective, you can measure how many users went to your in-app page to judge your content's effectiveness in drawing those potential customers in.
Landing pages
It's essential to recognize the role of landing pages in eCommerce marketing analytics. Landing pages are a critical component of an eCommerce site, and they should be designed with the same goals as any other page on your site: to convert visitors into customers.
To accomplish this goal, you'll want to keep two factors in mind: firstly, that each visitor has different needs and expectations; secondly, that they're arriving at your site from many other sources (such as paid ads or organic search). You can't expect all visitors to follow through with the same actions when they arrive on your website (e.g., completing an order or signing up for a newsletter). Still, all visitors share one characteristic: they're there for a reason. That is why your landing page design process must focus on meeting those needs first and foremost.
You also need to account for how much time you have before someone becomes frustrated and leaves your website altogether! Visitors who feel overwhelmed by information will certainly not return anytime soon. Instead of wasting their time explaining things that aren't relevant just yet (like which payment method is best), provide them with enough information about these topics so that they know what options are available within their reach. Ensure you show them how to take action from there.
Keywords
Performing research to determine the terms your audience uses when using search engines is known as keyword research. These keywords are then infused into your content to attract internet users' attention. Take heed, though: not all keywords are created equal.
Long tail keywords offer more specificity than broad keywords. Long-tail keywords typically convert better as they speak directly to customers' needs and interests. While this might seem elementary, many organizations spend their search advertising budgets on high-volume, generic words like "boots" or "online shopping." These may have a higher volume of searches (and, therefore, more potential customers). Still, they're also less likely to convert into sales because they don't provide enough information about what you're looking for.
Long tail keywords rank easier than broad terms because there aren't as many competing sites using them—although you shouldn't take this as an excuse not to optimize your site correctly. Longtail keywords can be a good way of finding new customers looking specifically for what you offer; however, if your website isn't optimized correctly, then it won't matter how practical these longtail terms are at converting visitors into customers. Google will penalize your rankings due to poor user experience factors such as bounce rate (how quickly users exit after clicking).
Related: When and How to Start Marketing Your eCommerce Business?
A/B testing
A/B testing means comparing two versions of a webpage to determine which performs better. For example, if you're selling shoes on your site and want to test different images for the product page, A/B testing could determine which image gets more clicks and sales.
A/B tests are great because they help you understand what works best for your audience. By comparing the results from these tests, you can optimize your website's content to convert better and drive more traffic back onto your site.
Multivariate testing (MVT)
Another form of A/B testing is multivariate, which tests multiple variables simultaneously. You can choose which variables to test and measure the impact of each change on your conversion rate. This means you can quickly determine which changes are most effective in improving your site's performance.
Referral traffic
Referral traffic is any internet traffic coming from a source outside your website. It can be generated by other websites, social media sites, search engines, and email campaigns.
Measuring what percentage of your incoming traffic is from referral traffic helps you gauge the strength of your referrers. For example, some brands use influencers to drive traffic to their website or landing page.
Sales cycle length
Sales cycle length is a metric that indicates how long it takes for a customer to complete their purchase. It's a good indicator of the company's ability to convert visitors into buyers. The sales cycle length can be calculated using several different variables, including:
- Time from the first visit until purchase (also known as acquisition time)
- Time between visits until the second visit (also known as retention rate)
- Time between the second visit and first transaction (also known as conversion rate)
All of these data points, taken together in concert, will paint a comprehensive picture of how fast it takes you to move a prospect through the sales cycle and turn them into a customer.
Marketing analytics are critical to your eCommerce marketing efforts
As an eCommerce marketer, one of the most important skills you'll need is the ability to extract value from data. It helps you understand which components of your marketing campaign are performing well and which aren't. In turn, you can use this data to pivot your activities to something more effective and, ultimately, more cost-efficient.
The marketing analytics tactics and techniques discussed in this post can help you discover the right audiences and understand your customers' behaviors. Using these tools and tricks, you can get your marketing efforts more targeted, increase sales and supercharge your customer satisfaction.
Want to figure out how to tap into the power of data and analytics to get the most out of your marketing for your eCommerce business? Onramp can help. Schedule a call today.
