If you have a physical retail outlet, you probably know how many visitors come into your store, what they are looking for, which days are best for sales, and even how much in sales you can expect on a weekly basis. Your e-commerce website should be no different, yet most website owners rely solely on sales data and number of visitors, not realizing how much more data is available from online visitors.
Good analytics software (such as Google Analytics, the industry standard) would allow you to see Key Performance Indicators for your e-commerce website such as number of visitors, length of visit, pages viewed per visit, bounce rates, conversion rates, where visitors came from and a myriad of other data that tells you more about your visitor than you may care to know.
So what do you do with this data? The first thing you should do is set a baseline for your e-commerce website. Capture data for a significant period of time (perhaps a month or so) to determine true figures. Then use that data to determine:
- Who are your visitors (demographic and geographic information).
- What pages are they visiting?
- Where are they come from (search engines? Referral sites? Advertising?)
- How long they are visiting your site?
- Conversions (including conversion rates, items purchased, dates and times).
This data will allow you to see correlations between specific events and successful conversions. For instance, you may find that any visit that exceeds 15 minutes and 20 visited pages always results in a conversion. As such, you can focus your site improvement efforts in relevancy, making your e-commerce website more interesting and informative, which should improve conversions.
Analysis of your data may also reveal specific geographic areas which convert better than others or perhaps specific search engines or advertising campaigns which generate the most sales. Should you decide to hire an SEO agency or run a Pay Per Click campaign you’ll know where to focus to get the best results and you’ll also be able to measure the campaign results much more objectively.
Lastly, should you ever decide to sell your e-commerce website, analytics data will confirm any claims you make during your sales pitch, making it that much easier to sell.
Feel free to contact us and we’ll be happy to discuss all the benefits of site analytics or any other e-commerce topics which can help improve your e-commerce website.
To your success!
Anton Pachkine
FinestShops E-Commerce Management
Hosting | Customizations | Design | Marketing
www.finestshops.com | 1-800-675-0162
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