You may have missed: The best options on how to deliver your products by cutting down supply chain wastage, managing customer returns, and automating your order orchestration in Chapter 8.

• Grow Your Business Faster With Advanced Ecommerce Analytics Platforms
• Grow Your Business Faster With Advanced Ecommerce Analytics Software
• Grow Your Business Faster With Advanced Ecommerce Analytics Tutorial
• Grow Your Business Faster With Advanced Ecommerce Analytics For Dummies

Few years ago, marketers and sellers are onerously poring over several data spreadsheets, manually going through row after row to figure out trends and insights. Today, instead of manually processing data, eCommerce analytics technology makes it possible to interact with data in a natural dialogue so everyone can get coherent answers and make immediate decisions.

COVID-19 has massively accelerated the growth of e-commerce, according to an Adobe report released today. Total online spending in May hit $82.5 billion, up 77% year-over-year. 1 GROW YOUR ECOMMERCE BUSINESS WITH CLOUD ERP WHAT IS CLOUD-BASED ERP? Cloud-Based Enterprise Resource Planning Cloud ERP automates and GROW YOUR ECOMMERCE.

With eCommerce analytics, you have access to vast information, but data on its own doesn’t get you that far. How you transform your data into actionable insights will make the difference. But, what eCommerce analytics metrics do you have to track, measure, and transform? What available eCommerce analytics platforms can make your life easier by running analysis in a secure and fast environment?

To leverage on analytics’ 1209% ROI, we have curated the analytics metrics that suit perfectly for online stores. Analytics can be complex and confusing with many types of metrics, but basically they fall into 3 stages in the customer’s journey: Traffic, Conversion, and Retention. Let’s see what types of eCommerce analytics metrics really matter in measuring the quality of your traffic.

This complete 10-chapter guide takes days to finish. How about downloading an ebook version to read on your Kindle for bedtime reading or while you’re on the train?

Stage 1: Traffic

Buyer’s Journeys: Awareness and Interest

Shoppers have arrived at your eCommerce store, now what? The following analytics metrics will help you take advantage of your site traffic when shoppers become aware of your store and show interest on your products.

1 – Visitor Frequency Analysis

Visitor frequency specifies the total number of visits made by a user on your online store. By using this metric, you can identify the rate of new users and the returning visitors. Since new users have new users have different mindsets compared to returning ones, analyzing how they behave separately can help you craft a better campaign suited for each of the segment’s needs.

Recommended Tools: Google Analytics’ New vs Returning report segments visitor frequency type instantly with a dashboard of pre-configured eCommerce metrics. You can also use Adobe Analytics’ Visit Number Report.

Putting it into action: Let’s use the New vs Returning report. If you don’t own a Google Analytics platform yet, you can set up a free demo account to experience it.

1 – Go to Audience > Behavior > New vs Returning. It will show you a dashboard like below.

2 – Pay attention to three sections: Acquisition, Behavior, and Conversions. These sections will help you unlock data opportunities.

Best Practices: Target new and returning visitors differently. Follow some best practices in visitor frequency analysis below:

1 – Capture new visitors right away. If you have high bounce rate and low average session duration, why not capture new visitors the moment they arrive at your store? Create an entrance popup asking for their email address so you can send relevant contents even after they bounce away.

Slide Belts has an entrance coupon popup built with Better Coupon Box app to capture first-time visitor’s email address.

2 – Delight and reward your returning visitors. If you see that your returning visitors make up more than half of your total revenue, make sure to continuously meet and exceed your their expectations. Send them a reward coupon for loyal customers via email to make them come back and make repeat purchase with you.

The Jewelry Lady store uses Mailbot app to create an automated reward coupon campaign that sends a reward coupon code to return customers who have made at least 2 orders.

2 – Marketing Channel Analysis

Marketing channels are various groupings of your online traffic sources. Depending on the tools you are using, the channels are most commonly group as Direct, Organic Search, Paid Search or Referrals.

Setting up a marketing channel analytics will allow you to quickly identify where your target market is. Think about it, just because a channel is highly dense doesn’t mean that it is the most strategic location to put all your promotional efforts.

Recommended Tools: Google Analytics’ Channel Report gives you an overview of your marketing channel’s performance in terms of behavior and conversion. GinzaMetrics has an interactive Marketing Channel Performance dashboard.

Putting it into action: The Channel Report from Google Analytics has a straightforward dashboard.

1 – Go to Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels. A dashboard similar to the one below will appear.

2 – You can deep-dive with each of the channel to reveal the sources that contributed to the channel’s performance.

Best Practices: Conduct real-time monitoring of your promotional campaigns to understand the next actions. Some actions and insights to consider when using marketing channel analysis.

1 – Cut or Revamp. If a channel is not meeting your goals, either modify your strategy for that channel or remove it right away. Just because a channel is popular means that it is also a good investment for you.

2 – Understand your triumph. You need to analyze why a specific channel returns the highest conversion. Is it because of the audience demographics or the campaign you ran? Take those strengths and apply them to your underperforming or promising and promising channels.

3 – Site Search Analysis

Site search analysis gives you a grasp of how your visitors use your online store’s search function, which terms they have entered, and how your search results lead into engagement.

It will enable you to manage your search term associations and search-based merchandising rules effectively. You can adjust relevancy settings, influence search result orders to boost specific products and overall improve your shoppers’ search experience.

Recommended Tools: Google Analytics’ has a Site Search capability to understand what your visitors are looking for. IBM Digital Analytics also offers an On-Site Search report.

Best Practices: Search terms will give you a glimpse on the needs and wants of your customers. Follow some of the best practices to site search analysis below:

1 – Identify underperforming terms and fine tune them accordingly. Identify which search terms do not add up to your conversions. Once identified, fine tune your search results to correlate the rightful offers to the searched term.

FootSmart used IBM Digital Analytics’ On-Site Search report. They began monitoring underperforming search terms and fine tuning their site search to return more relevant results. The initiative resulted in an 82% conversion improvement in just 6 months of implementation.

2 – Uncover new product ideas. On-site search term analytics will also tell you what your visitors cannot find in your store. For example, if you are an online flower shop and you received a thousand of searches for “red tulips” but you are currently not selling them, it tells you that it might be worth trying the idea of selling red tulips to take advantage of this unlocked opportunity.

Stage 2: Conversion

Buyer’s Journeys: Consideration, Purchase

Getting a high traffic but no one is buying? In this stage, we have the eCommerce analytics metrics that will guide you in successfully converting your shoppers who are currently considering to buy or about to make a purchase.

4 – Funnel Performance Analysis

In a Funnel Performance analysis, you are looking at your visitor’s progression through the various stages of conversion, starting from product page views, add-to-cart sessions, check-out sessions, and ultimately converted transactions.

Because shoppers’ behaviors are complex undertakings, we will be focusing our efforts on three funnel performance metrics that are closer to conversion:

• No Cart Addition Rate: Percentage of visitors who had product view sessions but did not add any item to their cart.
• Cart Abandonment Rate: Percentage of visitors who added items to their carts but left the site without proceeding to checkout.
• Checkout Abandonment Rate: Percentage of visitors who have gone through the checkout process but did not continue the purchase.

Recommended Tools: The above metrics can be tracked using Google Analytics’ Shopping Behavior Analysis which beautifully views them into a single dashboard or alternatively use KissMetrics Marketing Funnel.

To view above dashboard using Google Analytics, go to Conversions > Ecommerce > Shopping Behavior.

Best Practices: Let’s dissect each of the funnel performance metrics by understanding what possibly constitutes non-conversions and how you can decrease high abandonment rates in the future.

1 – No Cart Addition Rate: If you have a high number of visitors checking product pages but aren’t adding items to their carts, it might be rooted from the poor product description or overall ineffective product page. Make sure to redesign your product page by monitoring how your visitors scroll and click when they are browsing your site. Use eye tracking software such as Cool Tool or CrazyEgg to do this. You can also start implementing the best practices to an effective product page.

2 – Cart Abandonment Rate: If shoppers are leaving after adding products to their carts, this might indicate the various reasons why shoppers leave their carts such as unexpected shipping costs, long shipping time, comparison shopping, expensive price, or complicated navigation. If you are near or above the 68% shopping cart abandonment, you need to examine the reason why and create a plan to prevent this from happening.

A proven way to combat shopping cart abandonment is using exit-intent popups. Exit-intent technology happens when a visitor is just about to leave your site a popup message will appear convincing the visitor to take an action such as cart completion. You can use Better Coupon Box tool to create responsive exit-intent popups on both desktop and mobile devices.

3 – Checkout Abandonment Rate: If users abandon during the checkout process, you may have unnecessary steps or last-minute surprises like high shipping costs that shoppers are not expecting. The possibilities are endless, that is why Google Analytics created a separate in-depth report to help you analyze this problem using the Checkout Behavior Analysis.

The Checkout Behavior Analysis visualizes the progression of users through each of the steps of the checkout process. For example, if you observe that most of the shoppers leave at the first stage of the checkout process where account registration is required, you might want to consider adding a guest checkout option. The various reasons to checkout abandonment, so make sure you apply the best practices to effective checkout design to improve your checkout performance.

To prevent Checkout Abandonment due to required account registration, Havaianas has an alternative “Checkout as Guest” option.

5 – Product Performance Analysis

Analyzing individual product performances is a crucial stage in the conversion funnel. How many times was a product viewed or added to someone’s cart? What products are not performing as expected? With these information, you can see which products gained enough traction to put on your trending list. You can also check which products need new marketing promotions.

Recommended Tool: Google’s Product Performance Analysis provides valuable insights as to how visitors are engaging with your products and the overall purchases made for your individual merchandises. The dashboard below can be generated by going to Conversions > Ecommerce > Product Performance.

The more interesting portions of the report are the following:

• Cart-to-Detail Rate: Product adds divided by product detail views
• Buy-to-Detail Rate: Unique purchases divided by product detail views

Best Practices: You can use the Cart-to-Detail and Buy-to-Detail rates to understand if your product pages did encourage users to add the product to their carts or see if your cart design influenced shoppers to complete the purchase.

For example, if you have 80% Cart-to-Detail rate but your Buy-to-Detail rate dropped to 10%, it tells you that you that something in your cart or checkout process is preventing your shoppers to complete the purchase. They could have last moment realization that they want another product instead of the one on their shopping cart or possibly the shipping cost is just too high.

Zappos’ shopping cart drives up average order value by recommending more products that the customer might be interested in. It also highlights strategies to keep the customer interested with free shipping. Suggested tool for you to implement cart recommendations as Zappo: Personalized Recommendation app.

Stage 3: Retention

Buyer’s Journeys: Use, Advocacy

The retention stage will provide you with the right eCommerce analytics metrics to ensure that your product purchasers are encouraged for repeat purchase and product advocacy.

6 – User Retention Analysis

User retention analysis allows you to identify the group of individuals who returned to your online store for the nth time (day, week, month). By analyzing when your customers first visited your shop and the next time they’ve arrived at your online store again, you can unlock patterns and trends which will give you meaningful insights as to what course of actions you need to employ.

Recommended Tool: Using Google Analytics’ Cohort Analysis, you can segment your visitors from their acquisition date and then subsequently check their User Retention rate. The user retention rate is the number of users in a specific group who returned in the nth period of time divided by the total number of users in that group.

Putting it into practice: If we analyze the data above, you can unlock trend on the returning purchasers’ behavior. The densest days of returning purchasers are Day1 and Day 2. This means that recent buyers are more likely to return on the first and second day after they made a purchase. To take advantage of this situation, you need to create a campaign that encourages them to return even more so. For instance, give them a discount deal that can be redeemed only within two days.

To keep the engagement alive, Lazada sets up a triggered campaign by emailing the delivery status of a recently ordered product. Within that email, new products are being promoted to prompt customers to return to the site.

7– Social Influencer Analysis

Social influencer analysis helps you track individuals who can inspire action to a certain community. Influencers are generally common individuals with huge social media following. Once tapped, these influencers can amplify your contents, increase product awareness, and overall act as your brand ambassador advocating positive impact to your store. In fact, influencer marketing generates 37% higher retention rate compared to other acquisition channels.

Recommended Tool: Buzzsumo has Influencer Analysis tool to help you find the key influencers to promote your content. The tool is easy to use with the following key features:

• Filter by Type: You can easily filter the type of influencer you are looking for such as bloggers, journalists, regular people or existing influencer.

• Filter by Location: To better suit your brand, you can also filter your results by location like city or country.

• Understand the level of influence: Decide who is the right influencer for you by the influencer’s authority, the number of followers, retweet ratio, reply ratio etc.

eCommerce Analytics Made Easy

eCommerce Analytics, in itself, is a huge and complex undertaking. Focusing on what really matters to your store like the proven analysis above coupled with the right eCommerce analytics platforms to use can save you a lot of time and effort. But, remember that data won’t get you anywhere if you don’t start interpreting it and transforming data insights into tangible actions.

What’s next in Chapter 10: Learn how your online store can sustain customer loyalty by understanding the motivations, and the actions and strategies needed to retain customers.

15 Tips to Grow Your Business Online (without A Lot of Money)

Looking to grow your business online without a lot of money? If you are just starting a business, then you cannot afford to waste money. In this article, we will share practical tips on how to grow your business on a small budget. Our goal is to help you compete with the big guys without spending a fortune.

1. Choose The Right Platform for Your Website

The biggest mistake you can make as a small business is choosing the wrong platform to build your website. A wrong platform will not only cost you more money, but it will also limit your business’ growth potential.

We recommend using WordPress. It is the most popular website builder in the market, and it powers over 31% of all websites (including both small and large businesses).

When we say WordPress, we are talking about WordPress.org and not WordPress.com. They are two different platforms, see our article on the difference between WordPress.com vs WordPress.org for more details.

To start a self-hosted WordPress website, you’ll need a domain name AND a web hosting account. Yes, they’re different. Want to learn more? See our explanation: what’s the difference between domain name vs web hosting.

Different hosting companies offer different plans suitable for small to large websites. This ultimately affects the cost of your website.

If you are just getting started, then we recommend using Bluehost. They are one of the largest hosting companies in the world and an officially recommended WordPress hosting provider.

Luckily, they are offering WPBeginner users free domain name and discount on hosting. Basically, you’ll be able to get started for $2.75 per month.

As your business grows, you will likely need more hosting resources. Hopefully, by that time you’ll be making enough money to justify an upgrade.

Once you have a little more money to spend, then you can choose a managed WordPress hosting provider like WP Engine or SiteGround.

2. Choose a Functional Website with Simple Design

Many beginners believe that their customers will not take their business seriously if they don’t have their website professionally designed.

Getting a professional to custom design your website is expensive, and it’s not needed when you’re just starting out.

You can easily start with a ready-made free or premium WordPress theme for a fraction of a price.

See our expert’s pick of the best WordPress themes for some inspiration.

If none of the above themes suit your need, then you can also use these drag & drop WordPress page builders to create completely custom designs without writing any code.

3. Make it Easier for Users to Contact You

Grow Your Business Faster With Advanced Ecommerce Analytics Platforms

If you want your website to bring you more customers, then you need to add an easy way for visitors to contact you.

The easiest way to do that is by using a contact form on your website.

By default, WordPress doesn’t come with a contact form. Luckily, there are WordPress contact form plugins that can help you easily add a contact form to your site.

We recommend using WPForms Lite. It is the free version of the popular WPForms plugin that’s trusted by over 1 million websites.

Once your business has grown, you can upgrade to WPForms Pro to create more advanced forms like surveys, polls, payment forms, etc.

4. Start Building an Email List from Day 1

Most people who leave your website will never come back again. This means that if you don’t get their email address, then you will have no way to communicate with them in the future.

The most cost-effective way to do this is by building an email list.

Email marketing is the most reliable way to communicate with your website visitors.

You can get started with Constant Contact, they’re the top rated email marketing service provider in our list.

WPBeginner users get a free trial for those who’re just starting out and 20% off, if you upgrade to their paid plan.

For more tips, see our beginner’s guide on how to do lead generation in WordPress like a pro.

5. Get More Organic Traffic From Search Engines

Search engines like Google are the major source of traffic for most websites on the internet. There are a lot of things you can do to optimize your website for search engines by learning basic SEO.

SEO or search engine optimization is a set of guidelines and techniques that make your website more search engine friendly. It is not too technical and you will be able to do it on your own.

We have published a complete step by step WordPress SEO guide for beginners. We will walk you through the whole process of making your website as SEO friendly as possible.

To get traffic from search engines you’ll need content, which brings us to the next step in this guide.

6. Plan a Content Marketing Strategy

Content marketing is a strategy to create useful and relevant content to attract and build an audience. This allows you to get more targetted traffic from search engines without spending a fortune.

The easiest way to add useful content to your website is by adding a blog. WordPress allows you to add a separate blog page to your website and sort your content into categories and tags.

You need to plan your content strategy by finding out the keywords your users may be looking for. See our guide on how to do keyword research for your blog.

Need ideas on how to use those keywords in your content strategy? Here is a massive list of blog post ideas that you can use on your blog.

Content marketing is a highly effective and proven strategy to market your business on a small budget. To learn more about it, see this guide on how to create an effective content marketing strategy for your business.

7. Make Data-Based Decisions with Google Analytics

Many beginners use their best guesses to plan their growth strategy. You don’t need to do that when you can use actual data to make those decisions.

This is where Google Analytics comes in. It allows you to see how many visitors are coming to your site, where they are coming from, and what they do while there.

See our guide on how to install Google Analytics in WordPress for step by step instructions.

Google Analytics comes with a lot of information. Even though it is neatly organized and beautifully presented, it could still be a bit overwhelming for new users.

To make the most out of it, install and activate the MonsterInsights plugin. It is the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress and allows you to easily view your most important traffic reports inside WordPress dashboard. If you run an online store, then MonsterInsights can also help you track WooCommerce customers using Google Analytics.

You can also download the free version of MonsterInsights. It works great but you wouldn’t have access to some of its most advanced features.

8. Leverage Social Media to Drive Traffic

Social media platforms have highly engaged audiences. Facebook alone has 1.47 Billion daily active users, that’s around 18% of all people in the world. Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and other social media platforms also have highly engaged users.

With so many users, social media platforms bring great opportunities for business. You can start by creating your business’s social media profiles and automatically sharing your blog posts.

Next, you would want to make it easier for your users to share your content on social media. For that you will need a social media plugin for WordPress. These plugins add social sharing buttons to your WordPress site.

Grow Your Business Faster With Advanced Ecommerce Analytics Software

There are tons of other things that you can do to engage with audiences on social media. The key is to keep your profiles active, grow your following, and bring traffic back to your website.

• Create a Facebook group for your customers or industry
• Create a LinkedIn group for your industry
• Learn how to retarget users on Facebook with ads
• Focus on social networks important for your industry. For example, if you run a fashion blog or restaurant then you may find Instagram more helpful than LinkedIn.
• Don’t just bring traffic to your website, use social media to build your email list

9. Be an Active Participant in Online Communities

Online communities include forums and question-answer websites. These are the places people go to post their questions, socialize, find content, and explore. Top communities on the internet include Reddit, Stack Exchange, Quora, TripAdvisor, and more.

Grow Your Business Faster With Advanced Ecommerce Analytics Tutorial

These communities provide you with access to people interested in topics associated with your industry. You can join them for free and invest your time in building authority.

First, you need to find out which communities are more relevant to your business and where your potential customers may go looking for answers or content. For example, if you run a travel website, then you may find TripAdvisor more helpful than other communities.

Don’t spam these forums with links to your website in each post. Build authority by genuinely participating with helpful content, and mention your business or website when it is appropriate.

10. Convert Abandoning Website Visitors into Customers

Did you know that more than 70% of people who visit your website will never find it again? It is not your fault, it’s just that the internet is so huge and there are so many websites out there.

Each visitor who leaves your website is a potential customer that you are losing. To grow your business, you need to focus on converting those visitors into paying customers.

Grow Your Business Faster With Advanced Ecommerce Analytics For Dummies

This is where OptinMonster comes in. It is the best conversion optimization software in the market, which allows you to convert casual website visitors into loyal customers.

How does it do that?

It comes with a drag and drop campaign builder where you can create different types of campaigns to collect user emails, display special offers, show exit-intent popups, countdown timers, smart popups, slide-in optins, and more.

For more details, see this beginner’s guide on conversion rate optimization.

11. Start an Affiliate Partner Program

Affiliate marketing is a referral arrangement in which an online retailer (advertiser) pays commission to a referrer when users purchase a product using their referral link.

If you sell products online, then you can use affiliate marketing to partner up with skilled affiliate marketers. You will pay a sales commission to these marketers for promoting your products and bringing you sales.

You will need an affiliate management system to track referral activity and payout your affiliate partners. Here is our list of best affiliate management and tracking software that you can use.

You can also promote other people’s products or services to make extra money from your content. See our affiliate marketing guide for tips and tools you’ll need to get started.

12. Utilize Pay-Per-Click Advertising

Contrary to popular belief, you can run Pay-Per-Click advertising campaigns on a small budget. With programs like Google AdWords and Facebook Ads, you can set your own pricing, target keywords, audience, and more.

In fact, Google AdWords even offers free advertising credits to new advertisers. Bluehost, a trusted WordPress hosting company also offers free Google AdWords credits with their hosting plans.

You can use these credits to experiment with PPC advertising and get some paid traffic to your website for free.

13. Use Social Proof to Win Customers

Social Proof is a psychological phenomenon where people conform to the actions of others under the assumption that those actions are reflective of the correct behavior.

Marketers use this phenomenon by showing their customers that other people already trust a product or business. This is done by sharing their statistics, or subscriber counts, customer testimonials, and more.

Here is a list of clever ways to use social proof on your website to increase conversions.

14. Effectively Use FOMO to Boost Sales and Conversions

FOMO or ‘fear of missing out’ is a psychological term used to describe anxiety about missing out on something exciting and trendy.

As a business, you can take advantage of this human behavior and use it to boost sales and conversions. Basically, you need to build anxiety by adding scarcity to your offers. Here is a great example from Booking.com using scarcity to build anxiety.

For detailed instructions, see our article on how to use how to use FOMO on your WordPress site.

15. Improve Your Website’s Speed and Performance

Studies show that from 2000 to 2016, the average human attention span has dropped from 12 seconds to 7 seconds.

As a website owner, this means that you have very little time to show users what you have to offer and convince them to stay on your website.

Another study found out that a 1 second delay in page load time can lead to a 7% loss in conversions, 11% fewer page views, and a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction.

This means that you need to optimize your website to make sure that it is fast and performs well even under high traffic.

Follow the instructions in our step by step guide to improve WordPress speed and performance for beginners. This guide includes all the tips we use on our very high traffic websites for reliable speed and performance.

We hope this article helped you learn how to grow your business on a shoestring budget. You may also want to see our expert pick of the most useful tools to manage and grow your website.

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