Know How Analytics Plays a Key Role in Measuring Your Digital Commerce Success

With more businesses embracing digital commerce every day, companies have to develop a way to enhance their online visibility and reach. Hence, creating an insightful and effective digital marketing campaign is the need of the hour. However, no digital marketing campaign today is bulletproof. And digital marketing agencies understand this better than anyone.

To make a lasting impact through digital marketing efforts, you need to measure your actions and results and stay at the top of the game. It is a continuous process to analyze and improvise any digital campaign. Businesses should come up with specific strategies tailored to their market and niche. And, that is where advanced analytics come into play. eCommerce analytics lets you evaluate metrics related to the end-to-end customer journey from acquisition to conversion and advocacy to retention.

Before we jump on how you can transform your digital marketing strategies with data, let’s understand what is data tracking and why data analytics matter.Businesses need to record and analyze the total sales in an hour, a day, a week, a month, a quarter, and a year to monitor growth and seasonal trends. This can help the businesses plan ahead of time and keep a check on their website, server, and product inventory in times of traffic surges, such as the holiday season

Consumer demand coupled with tech innovations is expected to continue to drive growth in the global eCommerce market. The industry is forecasted to almost double in size by 2022, approx $6.54 trillion. Hence, this driver of success will build deep connections with empowered customers over the next decade. And, the only way to understand the dynamics of consumer behavior is to measure, understand and analyze.

In a study, Deloitte states that 49% of respondents make better decisions with the help of analytics. Another 16% say that it helps forge vital strategic initiatives. And, 10% say that it helps improve the consumer-business bond. Yet, businesses are having a tough time navigating through the data. Companies state measuring and reporting eCommerce performance as a top challenge.

Times are challenging and hence, are growth catalysts. This once-in-generation paradigm shift is having a profound impact on the eCommerce industry. Therefore, companies need to take advantage of the increased traffic, online sales, and changing consumer behavior.

This article will take you through the metrics necessary to determine the effectiveness of your digital marketing campaigns and understand how data, analytics, and insights beautifully complement the new normal. Track the following KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for your digital marketing campaigns to collect data that can help improve conversions and achieve marketing goals.

Data is the ultimate treasure trove of digital marketing. It is essential to understand what KPIs to track to help you roll out effective strategies. Some of the popular KPIs for any eCommerce business are website traffic (inclusive of new and returning visitors), conversion rate, bounce rate, referral traffic, pay-per-click (PPC), click-through rate (CTR), page views, average time spent on the website or particular specific page, average order value, site speed and many more. Generally, there are three broad categories of KPIs to consider.

Understanding eCommerce website data is crucial for business owners. They need to know how their eCommerce platform performs, analyze customer journeys and learn what content or merchandising brings in the most conversions by considering the following KPIs.

1. Sales: Businesses need to record and analyze the total sales in an hour, a day, a week, a month, a quarter, and a year to monitor growth and seasonal trends. This can help the businesses plan ahead of time and keep a check on their website, server, and product inventory in times of traffic surges, such as the holiday season.
2. Average Order Value (AOV): The average amount the customer spends each time they place an order via an eCommerce website or the mobile app is the AOV. This enables the businesses to decide the reasonable cost of products, create product bundles, or even cross-sell and upsell products.
3. Conversion Rate: It is the percentage of visitors who complete the customer journey with a purchase. Businesses must look for a healthy conversion rate that reflects high customer engagement and is a sign of growth and success. In case of a low conversion rate, you need to map the customer journey and see why you are losing visitors.
4. Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate: Shopping cart abandonment is a crucial challenge that eCommerce faces. A considerable percentage of potential customers abandon their carts before or during the checkout process. Businesses should determine the abandonment rate and optimize the checkout process accordingly. Also, learn more about the reasons for abandonment by looking at where the customers are leaving in the process. Winning back the vanishing customers (people who have abandoned their carts) by retargeting them becomes an altogether new marketing campaign that targets an intent-driven audience.
5. Online Traffic (New vs. Returning): The number of people visiting your eCommerce store needs to be determined both for new and returning visitors. A good number of unique visitors points toward good marketing and advertising strategy. And, if your customers return to your online store, it is a sign of high customer engagement and customer loyalty.
6. Website Speed: The time your website or specific landing pages take to load is crucial to your business. In case your eCommerce website takes more than 3 seconds to load, you might lose a significant number of your potential customers. Make sure you measure your page load speed and optimize if new pages and products are added.
7. Bounce Rate: The percentage of visitors leaving your online store after viewing a single page is a sign of your content not resonating with your target audience. In this highly competitive eCommerce industry, content is the king. Effectively reducing the bounce rate may trigger more time on-site and eventually lead to conversions.
8. Traffic Source: It is essential to know how your marketing campaigns work and which strategies give you the best results. Learning the traffic source certainly helps to pinpoint the source of your potential customers. For instance, if you have a lot of LinkedIn traffic, your social media marketing efforts may be working, but if it is direct, kudos to your content and loyalty programs.
9. Mobile Site Traffic: With the increase in smartphone users, measuring mobile site traffic is a must. It lets you determine the number of mobile users visiting your website. If you experience high mobile traffic, make sure your online store is mobile responsive and consider an eCommerce shopping mobile app for your business.
10. Day Part Monitoring: Day part monitoring tells you the time of the day when most people visit your online store. This parameter will help your team decide when to drop new launches or push promotions.
11. Product Affinity: Keeping an eye on products that are frequently bought together might help you brainstorm and roll out cross-promotional strategies.

Some of the KPIs are important in determining the overall performance of a digital marketing campaign. This gives valuable insight to the business owners to roll out better strategies in the future. Standard digital marketing campaigns are email marketing, paid socials, and affiliate marketing that includes working with influencers and paid searches. Here are some of the KPIs crucial to measuring digital marketing campaign success.

1. Pay-Per-Click (PPC): PPC tells you the volume of traffic you are driving to the landing page or your online store from a paid search campaign. This will give you clarity on the targeted keywords you spend on for your business.
2. Click-Through-Rate (CTR): CTR refers to the percentage of users on a page or emailer or any asset who clicks on a link. It is a crucial parameter to determine if your content is powerful enough to drive engagement and traffic.
3. Email Open Rate: The success of your email marketing campaign can be measured by the percentage of email recipients that open the email. If this rate is low, try using creative content and attractive promotions. Also, clean out your subscribers’ list by removing inactive subscribers.
4. Social Media Followers: Social media following is a whole another customer community and can drive customer engagement in creative ways. Make sure you can address customer pain points and engage with them by providing reliable solutions.
5. Product Reviews: Product reviews should be audited, and marketers should monitor their number and quality. These reviews are essential for a website’s SEO and also offer valuable feedback directly from the customers. It can be an indicator of overall customer satisfaction.
6. Banner or Display Advertisements CTR: :The percentage of viewers clicking on the display advertisement or the banner will help you evaluate the quality of your advertising, copy, graphics, promotions, in short, overall content.
7. Blog Traffic: Blogs are one of the main drivers of traffic if created optimally. Your overall content, quality, number of keywords, and readability are all the elements to look for. Blog traffic can help you strategize your blog page and plan for third-party guest posts to generate extra traffic.
8. Affiliate Performance: Monitoring affiliate performance enables you to divert your resources towards the most successful channels for affiliate work.
9. Average Position (Search): It all comes down to search engine page ranking, one of the most critical parameters to monitor and work upon. As most businesses aim to rank first in popular search engines for relevant keywords, best practices for SEO must be followed to achieve the same.

It is necessary to obtain a big picture of your business performance. This is incredibly helpful, especially while building a scalable business plan and pitching to investors. Following are KPIs, which give you a holistic view of how your eCommerce business is performing.

• Competitive Pricing: Success lies in the competitive analysis of the market. You need to monitor what the competitors are doing and charging for a similar product. It will help you enhance the conversion rate.
• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): How much you spend on average to acquire a new customer by looking at your total market spend constitutes the CAC. It helps determine the business’s real ROI for marketing and advertisements, and having an insight into CAC can facilitate aligning campaigns with your budget.
• Gross Profit: Profit is what businesses yearn for. Hence, the gross profit is the total cost of products with marketing cost subtracted from total sales. This is the bottom line, if or not your business is bringing you profit.

To analyze your digital marketing strategy, you need to put together a market expert team and start working through the following steps.

• Digital Marketing Campaign Objectives: 

Everyone in your company must be involved in your campaign efforts to ensure success in digital marketing. Deep thinking and brainstorming will help you turn the broadest of parameters into well-defined business objectives. The business owners must be sure of what results they expect from a digital marketing campaign before execution.

• Set Clear and Achievable Targets: 

After you have identified your business goals, set specific targets and goals for each of the parameters, critical thinking by the top management and eCommerce experts will aid the marketers in executing the campaigns with ease and reach the set goals.

• Define Target Segments of your Digital Marketing Strategy:

Identifying target segments to focus on is the next step after defining targets for your digital marketing campaign. This includes groups of people or individuals from certain demographic groups, geographies, businesses, companies, or even industries involved in a particular niche.

• Establish KPIs to Measure the Success of the Digital Marketing Campaign:

With defining objectives to guide your campaign, you must establish KPIs as your digital marketing performance gauge. These parameters will help you to monitor your performance against the targets you want to achieve on certain fronts and even for your business as a whole.

• Identify Individual Targets for each KPI:

Specific targets must be set for each of your KPIs. These parameters will help you measure your success in quantifiable terms.

• Find an Advanced Analytics Platform or a Digital Marketing Agency 

It is nearly impossible to monitor all the KPIs manually in this digital age. Hence, either you can find a good analytics platform, free or paid, to facilitate measurement and work upon your business goals with your in-house team of digital marketing experts. Or, you can hire a good digital marketing agency with ample expertise and experience in the industry and work on a digital marketing strategy that resonates with your objectives.

• Apply Real-Time Solutions:
  
  You can reset and repeat your digital marketing campaigns with factual data and insights to cater to your targets. These insights should trigger prompt action and should be executed immediately as the situation calls.

With the enormous growth in the industry and the expected rise of eCommerce in the coming years, the online presence and digital efforts are more crucial than ever. It is of utmost necessity to improve business performance continuously. It does not matter if you hire a digital marketing agency, a freelancer, or even do it with your in-house team. The bottom line is to track, analyze, measure, and grow with perfection. If you want to know how your business is performing in the digital marketing front so far or hire one of the well-known industry experts, contact Krish today.