Every e-commerce owner has heard of analytics, but not everyone understands its value. Why is analytics so important and what benefits does it bring to online stores? See for yourself!
Why is it worth investing in analytics?
Every owner of their own e-commerce appreciates such a gift as business intuition. It is a skill that makes it easier to make specific decisions and determine the direction of the company’s development. However, even the most developed intuition cannot become the basis of your business. What counts here are specific data that you will be able to scrutinize. Relying only on your own wishes and assumptions does not give a complete picture of the situation and can lead to elementary errors.
So what does analytics give us?
- Getting to know your target audience.
Determining and getting to know the needs of your recipients is a decisive basis for the functioning of any business. Collecting data makes it possible to determine who is most likely to use our products and what their requirements are. Further, we can decide to segment the target group and adapt our activities to their lifestyle and preferences.
Never skip the stage of identifying your purchasing personas, even if you think it’s obvious who your products are made for.
- Verification of activities.
Want to know if this ad format works for sales? How effective is the marketing campaign? You will get answers to these questions by delving into analytics. It will show you what appealed to your recipients and which actions were profitable in terms of business. This is the first step towards effective optimization.
- Flexibility and adaptation to the market.
Observing the behavior of your personas will allow you to quickly detect new trends emerging on the market. The constant volatility of the e-commerce world requires you to be flexible and react quickly to changing preferences of your customers.
- Making informed decisions.
A database of specific data, subjected to meticulous analysis, is conducive to making the right business decisions. You receive a clear signal on what is worth investing in, what channels to choose and how to allocate your budget effectively.
To sum up, effective analytics contributes to increasing reach, building a constant relationship with recipients and better orientation on the market. As a result, you can count on business development and increased profits.
How to collect data effectively?
If you want to enjoy the benefits of effective analytics, you must first choose the right tools. In this area, Google Analytics is reliable, which provides us with information such as: demographic data and behavior of website visitors, traffic sources, session duration, device type, and conversion rate. By implementing GA, you gain detailed data and records necessary to take effective action.
At this point, it is worth paying attention to one more thing, i.e. the correctness of the GA configuration. Here we mean the configuration of filters that allow you to adjust analyzes and reports to the needs of the company. In order to set them (and at the same time increase the effectiveness of the software), you need to define your conversion, indicate which factors you want to measure and which ones to ignore. This way you will avoid distortions and unclear statistics.
You can also use tools such as Semstorm, Senuto or Hotjar to collect and analyze data.
How to use data in the online store?
Data analyzes will be useful to you at virtually every stage of the store’s operation. They will help in designing a website according to UX principles, building a shopping path for users, optimizing solutions and planning specific marketing campaigns and entire strategies.
Conclusions
It is safe to say that analytics (and above all, drawing conclusions from it!) is the basis for the success of every online store. If you want to avoid more or less serious analytical errors, it is worth thinking about a professional audit and constant help from specialists.