Originally published Demeber 15th, 2022
Last updated May 27th, 2025
Many online merchants find a few valuable tricks with their analytics tools and see some minor advantages, but it can feel like squeezing ROI droplets out of a routine that only sees minor changes. They hear about analytics in favorable terms, but it seems complicated to know where to begin when there are over 100 eCommerce analytics tools to choose from. Regardless of the nature of your business, what is the best analytics for eCommerce?
With the rise of powerful ecommerce analytics tools, modern ecommerce businesses can now make faster, more data-driven decisions using customizable dashboards and real-time data.
We'll cover eCommerce analytics from a bird's eye view and then dive into specific metrics to help you develop your best analytics practices. As you read through the different metrics explained below, consider which are most applicable to your online store. If used diligently, contextually relevant analytics applications will create an unstoppable momentum for greater revenue controls and essential revelations about your market.
The right analytics platform can help you uncover actionable insights from your ecommerce data, guiding everything from marketing campaigns to checkout optimization.
The Best Analytics for eCommerce Depend on You.
High-quality data helps business owners understand the most significant factors impacting their company at any given moment. It can provide a high-level overview of your overall performance and granular detail about each element influencing that performance.
Metrics such as conversion rates, average order value, and bounce rates are some of the most critical key performance indicators (KPIs) for success.
At first, it can take a lot of work to apply it to changing, real-time scenarios. It's much easier when looked at from a specific, needs-based perspective, so you keep sight of relevancy. Every eCommerce business must keep accurate track of its overall revenue, so that's the most foundational place to begin. When you see how the lifeblood of your business is functioning, you'll naturally see where it's coming from and where it's going.
Whether you're on Shopify, Amazon, or another ecommerce platform, building custom reports allows better visibility into your top sales performance metrics.
You'll then see other analytics grab your attention, sensing their cohesion with the big picture (and their influence on your bottom line). Gradually, your analytics reports will become customized to the unique activities that bear the most on your revenue, revealing the needs and trajectory of your company. Rather than see it as a glut of information you must digest from A to Z, begin with the basic foundations applicable to all businesses, branching out into more specific territory as the needs arise.
This process improves forecast accuracy and helps reduce cart abandonment and drop-off through smarter user behavior targeting.
Over time, your understanding of analytics will become much more fluid — but most importantly, you'll be able to leverage your knowledge in the most impactful ways for your specific market niche. The essential eCommerce analytics are most relevant to you and the challenges your company and customers face.
This enables smarter pricing, better marketing strategies, and stronger customer retention.
Related: eCommerce Reporting Best Practices
The Basis of eCommerce Analytics
To begin, the best analytics for eCommerce provides a clearer picture of your sales channels, their performance, and the forces most significantly impacting them. Once you're comfortable measuring these, the following crucial data points guide your newfound understanding to best use. The former shows you where you're at, while the latter shows you how to improve the former.
Using advanced analytics tools like Glew, Google Analytics, or Mixpanel gives your ecommerce store the ability to optimize everything from social media campaigns to website traffic.
Each metric has a cause-and-effect relationship with other metrics, and those patterns are more illuminating than any statistic or figure. Your business strategies will improve as they align with these patterns, especially those related to your customer's shopping habits. To begin recognizing those patterns, you'll need a solid working knowledge of the eCommerce analytics categories outlined below.
With automation, you can simplify tracking across various marketing channels, including Google Ads, CRM activity, and ad spend performance.
These fundamentals will help you begin testing your theories about your market, and it becomes fun and accessible once you see firsthand how it responds to your adjustments.
Visualizing this information with data visualization tools helps transform key metrics into informed decisions.
At its most basic level, this amounts to improving the ROI of specific efforts, which itself requires defining success for your business. While the actual ROI is increased profits, how will you raise them? The answer to this is where specific data points become more meaningful than others. As with anything in analytics, the solutions must always be contextual.
Great ecommerce analytics isn’t just about seeing what’s happening — it’s about empowering optimization at every touchpoint.
Consider eCommerce analytics in terms of five general categories:
- Customer base
- Traffic activity
- Customer behavior
- Revenue
- Marketing
Extrapolating from the basic-five framework listed above, we'll explore the most critical data points generically and as they relate to specific scenarios.
Customer Base
To sustainably tighten eCommerce cash flow, all companies need to know their audience. What is your clientele's overall motivation? Which problems are they trying to solve, and where do your capabilities overlap with their needs?
Segmenting your audience by demographics, location, or behavior enhances your marketing analytics and builds a more relevant customer experience.
Above all, what do you need to know about them to convert profit potential into actual profits?
- Customer preferences — how else will you ensure your inventory, services, content, and overall brand message are what they're looking for?
- Customer engagement — what's the level of brand awareness in your market base, and how often, when, and where do they engage with it?
- Quality of customer support — are your customers likely to become repeat customers, and how do your response times and communications practices impact repeat sales figures?
Improving customer lifetime value starts with investing in the right analytics solution that tracks customer engagement and behavior over time.
Measuring the biases of your market as it already is will help you position yourself to capture more of its activity.
Traffic Activity
It's not enough to know how many site visitors you have, with omnichannel presence and personalization schemes so normalized — though they're also generating increasing customer wariness. To reach the right balance, you'll need some consistency in gauging where customers are coming from, which helps you hone your marketing efforts in ways that land well with your customer base's expectations. Effective web analytics helps identify which marketing efforts are generating the most website performance gains.
Before even getting tricky, though, measuring site traffic patterns is a prerequisite for comparing them to future patterns as you make other adjustments. Traffic analysis mainstays include traffic levels, peak traffic times, and customer geolocations (although the latter must be taken with a grain of salt, as an estimated 31% of total web users sometimes use proxies).
More detailed analysis helps web designers see which pages are more popular than others, and digital marketers rely on thorough traffic reports all the more.
Using tools like Hotjar or Kissmetrics enables heatmaps and A/B testing that expose real-time behavior trends.
Related: How to Sell Through Multiple eCommerce Platforms
Customer Behavior
Getting to the heart of your customer's motivations, as described above, helps you begin seeing their behavior in a new light. As customer behavior most radically determines the trajectory of your future sales, you'll need to measure how those behaviors manifest throughout your site activity.
Tracking user behavior at the checkout page or during product views gives valuable insights into your abandonment rate and sales funnel health.
This is when the best analytics for eCommerce businesses become more dimensional, revealing a narrative about the customer-brand relationship. Spend some particular quality time delving into behavior metrics such as:
- Time spent on site
- Content engaged with
- Products looked at
- Purchase timing
With any statistic, measures can be either qualitative (subjective data) or quantitative (measured precisely). Studying behavior increases the level of qualitative analysis required, which is easiest done with surveys or reviews of your customer communications. This blends with marketing metrics covered below — consider quantitative measures, such as those above, with more authority.
Revenue
This is where the rubber hits the road, or in fact, already hit the road. Increasing revenue and decreasing costs have always been the most basic formula for business health, and businesses should view virtually all metrics with two goals:
- Increase revenue
- Decrease costs
Altogether, these are seen in the average profit margin measurement (costs minus sales). More tellingly, the monthly sales growth reveals the longer-term health of your business. This can also be done quarterly and annually, which helps adjust monthly sales goals more realistically.
The purchase rate and average purchase amount are essential, and most merchants do this automatically. When they look at their periodic sales, they have an innate sense of how many customers they serve and how much they spend. Revenue metrics go deep into calculating the ROI of any activity, which shows which activities are more worth your company's time.
Visualizing ROI across dashboards makes it easier to streamline your best-performing channels.
Inventory management comes into play too. Analyze product performance whenever you need to place an order with your suppliers. Track the expenses involved in carrying each product to know exactly how good carrying that product is (not just how much initial revenue it creates). For example, some top sellers may result in greater customer service or return issues.
The analytics involved in tracking revenue health are extensive and are the keystone for knowing which other metrics need your attention. Once you see the state of your company's financial health, the most important tasks naturally become more evident.
Marketing
Understanding marketing campaign performance requires drawing from analytics for multichannel sources. Once they've been compiled, you can then calculate and compare the performance of each channel. Overall, marketers need to look at their lead conversion rate to gauge the effectiveness of their marketing efforts. If it's low, it could mean there needs to be more understanding of the audience and what they need. Top marketing analytics tools help brands identify weak points in their customer acquisition and retargeting funnels.
Marketing requires a thorough understanding of the Customer Base and Customer Behavior metrics discussed above, and you can often save time discovering what they want by conducting customer surveys.
Conclusions based on qualitative analyses like surveys should constantly be tested, as they are more theoretical. Once you prove your theories, however, you begin shifting back to quantitative measures, establishing a feedback loop of analytics, adjustments, and verification. The right key features in your analytics stack can give you a major edge over other online business competitors.
Building on Previous Knowledge
In today’s hyper-competitive landscape, having the right eCommerce analytics software is no longer optional—it’s essential. Whether you're operating on Shopify, WooCommerce, or another ecommerce platform, using advanced analytics tools like Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Glew, Woopra, or Kissmetrics empowers store owners to make data-driven decisions that directly impact profitability. These user-friendly platforms deliver real-time valuable insights into your sales performance, marketing campaigns, and customer behavior, helping you optimize every step of the customer journey.
Great analytics platforms let you visualize key KPIs and key metrics through customizable dashboards, from conversion rates, average order value, and bounce rate, to deeper customer segmentation, user behavior, and cart abandonment patterns. By analyzing heatmaps, performing A/B testing with tools like Hotjar or Crazy Egg, and tracking metrics across marketing channels and email campaigns, you gain actionable insights into what’s working—and what’s not.
For ecommerce businesses, this means smarter pricing, better marketing strategies, higher customer retention, and improved checkout experiences. You can track attribution across Google Ads, social media, and other digital marketing efforts, aligning your ad spend with the online shopping behaviors that drive growth.
The best analytics tools help online business owners not only streamline website traffic and reduce drop-off but also enhance the customer experience and increase customer lifetime value. With automation features, easy integration across platforms, and strong SEO tracking, the best ecommerce analytics tools give you the power to scale smarter and faster.
Don’t just collect customer data—use it to make informed decisions that transform your ecommerce store into a revenue-driving machine. The right analytics solution doesn’t just show you what’s happening—it shows you what to do next.
If you’re ready to leverage your eCommerce analytics and take your business to the next level, Onramp can help. Contact us today to hear how we can help you bulk up your stock (and your cash flow) to boost your business.
