Top 7 Analytics Tools For Ecommerce
Every business, irrespective of its size and domain, is turning digital. The use of online shopping has increased significantly in recent years, making it necessary for retailers to have the right tools to understand their customers and market. In this digital era, eCommerce analytics tools provide insights into key performance metrics and customer behavior, helping D2C (Direct-to-Consumer) companies make data-driven decisions. These tools typically track website traffic, conversion rates, sales data, customer demographics, and more.
E-commerce businesses should choose their data integration strategy based on their specific needs and the types of data they need to integrate. It's important to ensure that data is accurate, consistent, and up-to-date for meaningful analysis and reporting. The practice of bringing data from various sources into a single platform, and getting a unified view of the data is important for eCommerce businesses to effectively analyze and utilize their data to drive growth.
Top Parameters to Consider Before You Choose Your Next eCommerce Analytics Tool
There are multiple vital factors that you must look into to get the best eCommerce analytics tool for your online business. These factors can help you determine which tool best meets your business needs and goals.
- User Acquisition and Retention: Your preferred analytics tool should be able to track and analyze the customer journey, including acquisition channels and behavior over time.
- Conversion Rate Optimization: Factors like tracking and analyzing conversion rates, identifying key bottlenecks, and measuring the impact of changes to the conversion process are some must-haves for your next eCommerce analytics tool.
- Sales and Revenue: Top eCommerce analytics tools monitor sales and revenue performance, understand key drivers of growth, and measure the impact of marketing initiatives.
- Customer Lifetime Value: Tools in the market today can seamlessly measure and analyze the value that customers bring over their lifetime, including repeat purchases and cross-sell/up-sell opportunities.
- User Experience: You should be able to track and measure the user experience on the website and app, including page load times, engagement, and customer feedback with a third-party e-comm analytics tool.
The Best eCommerce Analytics Tools
Making your eCommerce data speak sense is not as easy as it seems, and the same might leave you frustrated. The reason behind this is that many e-retailers don’t incorporate the right tools. This is why we are listing down the best eCommerce analytics tools that are different based on their functionality, ease of use, and benefits.
Google Analytics
Every individual in the data-driven business world must be familiar with Google Analytics. It is one of the best analytics tools that you can use for free. It is easy to align an eCommerce site with Google analytics. With this platform at your end, you can easily keep a tab on the amount of traffic coming to your virtual doorstep. You can quickly figure out which marketing strategies are working best for you and which are not, so that emphasis can be put on the ones that are bringing favorable outcomes. The tool will help you keep an eye on:
- How each product is performing on your site
- From where the traffic is coming (desktop, mobile, tablet) and what is making that traffic convert.
- Which pages on your site have the most engagement and which pages are contributing to the bounce rate.
Google Analytics will inform you how many visitors are checking your site daily, which products they are interested in, how much time they spend on each page, and so much more. The tool has enhanced eCommerce capabilities that can help you retain your present customers and attract new ones.
Woopra
In an eCommerce store, there is nothing more heart-wrenching than your customers abandoning an order. There can be multiple reasons behind it, such as you are making your customers navigate through too many hoops, or there may be something about your pricing or payment terms that are making them drive off. No matter what the reason is, things need to be improved before your business experiences a downfall.
Woopra helps eCommerce merchants to protect their orders from getting abandoned. The eCommerce analytics tool monitors the abandonment rate based on certain actions like payment or shipment and provides a clear picture of what sections of your funnel need to be focused on. The tool also generates individual profiles to show you how each customer is interacting with your eCommerce store or sales team.
The tool motivates your customers to buy your products instead of bouncing so that you can generate more than the expected revenue.
Hotjar
It is difficult to assume how each customer sees your eCommerce store. To find what’s on your website that will boost the click-through rate and increase the conversion rate, you have to step into your customer’s shoes.
Hotjar is a heat mapping eCommerce analytics tool that can help you by providing a bird’ s-eye view of what your visitors see on your site. It lets you create recordings of your real-time customers so that you can see how your customers are interacting and develop insights that will enhance the conversion rate significantly.
By monitoring the activities of your real-time customers, you can get answers to the following questions:
- Why are your visitors not clicking on your CTAs?
- What’s on your website is grabbing the audience’s attention?
- What are the errors or bugs that are not letting the conversion rate to boost?
By getting answers to these questions, you can improve your site’s performance and fix bugs & errors that are coming in the way of a better ROI.
Kissmetrics
Kissmetrics is a highly-advanced analytical platform that provides valuable user-centric insights that further assist you in delivering great products at leading prices. The tool drills down the users who actually went to your product page instead of the ones who visited your site and then left. With Kissmetrics analysis, brands can remarket their brand and make way to the audience which can add more to their ROI. The tool helps you know which marketing campaign is bringing the most leads and which campaign is not so that you run the right one.
Kissmetrics also finds out what’s in your website design that can be changed to bring more engagement to boost the conversion rate. The tool allows you to create and trigger pop-ups and notifications that, to some extent, aid in decreasing the bounce rate. The tool comes with a price tag owing to its advanced capabilities.
Glassbox
Glassbox is an eCommerce analytics tool that provides valuable insights into customer behavior and website performance. By integrating with multiple eCommerce platforms, it collects and analyzes data from various sources, providing real-time insights into customer interactions and website performance. This information is crucial for optimizing website performance and improving the overall customer experience. Glassbox allows eCommerce businesses to focus on key metrics through customizable dashboards and provides granular data analysis to help businesses understand customer behavior and identify areas for improvement. With Glassbox, eCommerce businesses can drive sales and improve the customer experience, leading to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Mixpanel
Mixpanel is a web and mobile analytics platform that helps eCommerce businesses understand their customers and optimize their website performance. It provides real-time insights into user behavior, website performance, and customer engagement, allowing businesses to make informed decisions and improve the customer experience.
The following groups within the eCommerce sector can benefit from using Mixpanel:
- eCommerce managers and executives: Mixpanel provides a comprehensive view of customer behavior, allowing managers and executives to make data-driven decisions about product development, marketing strategies, and customer experience optimization.
- Marketing and product teams: Mixpanel helps marketing and product teams understand customer behavior, track the success of marketing campaigns, and measure the impact of product changes.
- User experience (UX) designers: Mixpanel provides valuable insights into customer behavior and website performance, allowing UX designers to identify areas for improvement and optimize the user experience.
- Data analysts: Mixpanel provides granular data analysis, allowing data analysts to dive deep into customer behavior and understand the reasons behind customer actions.
Overall, Mixpanel can be a valuable tool for any eCommerce business looking to understand its customers.
Glew
Glew.io is a powerful eCommerce analytics platform that provides businesses with valuable insights into their customer data. By integrating with multiple eCommerce platforms, it collects and analyzes customer data from various sources, providing a comprehensive view of customer behavior and website performance. This information is crucial for improving website performance and optimizing the customer experience. Glew.io offers a user-friendly interface, making it easy to navigate and understand the data, and provides customizable dashboards that allow eCommerce businesses to focus on the metrics that are most important to them. In addition, Glew.io provides real-time insights, allowing businesses to quickly identify and respond to changes in customer behavior and website performance. Overall, Glew.io can be a valuable tool for any eCommerce business looking to understand its customers and improve its website performance, leading to increased sales and improved customer satisfaction.
Bonus Entry: Optimizely
Optimizely is a website optimization platform that enables eCommerce businesses to test, personalize, and optimize their websites to improve the customer experience and drive conversions. It provides a range of tools and features that allow businesses to test different variations of their website and analyze the results, personalize the website for individual customers, and make data-driven decisions to optimize website performance. The best use cases for Optimizely are in the following areas:
- Website optimization: Optimizely can be used to test different variations of a website and determine which ones perform best, leading to increased conversions and improved customer experience.
- Personalization: Optimizely can be used to personalize the website for individual customers, based on factors such as behavior and demographics, to improve the customer experience.
- A/B testing: Optimizely can be used to test different variations of website elements, such as call-to-action buttons and product descriptions, to determine which ones perform best and increase conversions.
Bottom line, Optimizely can be a valuable tool for eCommerce businesses looking to optimize their website and improve customer experience.
DataChannel Helps You Make Sense of Your eCommerce Data
Just adding an eCommerce analytics tool doesn’t suffice in many cases. To effectively analyze eCommerce data, the data needs to be cleaned, transformed, and structured in a way that can be easily understood by the analytics tool. However, setting up ETL systems and pipelines is not a simple task, due to the inherent challenges of handling multiple data sources each with their own APIs, authentication systems, data formats, rate limitations etc, coupled with continually changing business requirements and needs. This calls for a lot of manual effort and time, resulting in data teams wasting energy on data monitoring and maintenance.
The alternative? Adapting to an ETL platform. (Read more about building vs. buying data pipelines here)
Tools like DataChannel ensure that the data is properly formatted and structured so that your eCommerce analytics tool can provide meaningful insights and analysis. For example, DataChannel has the ability to provide insights into things like your most popular products, the average order value, the customer purchase history, and the geographical distribution of sales. The eCommerce business can use these insights to inform decisions, such as adjusting product pricing, optimizing marketing campaigns, and improving customer experience. Hence, by using both tools together, the eCommerce business can gain a comprehensive understanding of its performance and customers.
DataChannel – An Integrated ETL & Reverse ETL Solution
- 100+ Data Sources. DataChannel’s ever-expanding list of supported data sources includes all popular advertising, marketing, CRM, financial, and eCommerce platforms and apps along with support for ad-hoc files, google sheets, cloud storages, relational databases, and ingestion of real-time data using webhooks. If we do not have the integration you need, reach out to our team and we will build it for you for free.
- Powerful scheduling and orchestration features with granular control over scheduling down to the exact minute.
- Granular control over what data to move. Unlike most tools which are highly opinionated and dictate what data they would move, we allow you the ability to choose down to field level what data you need. If you need to add another dimension or metric down the line, our easy-to-use UI lets you do that in a single click without any breaking changes to your downstream process.
- Extensive Logging, fault tolerance and automated recovery allows for dependable and reliable pipelines. If we are unable to recover, the extensive notifications will alert you via slack, app and email for taking appropriate action.
- Built to scale at an affordable cost. Our best-in-class platform is built with all ETL best practices built to handle billions of rows of data and will scale with your business when you need them to, while allowing you to only pay for what you use today.
- Get started in minutes. Get started in minutes with our self-serve UI or with the help of our on-boarding experts who can guide you through the process. We provide extensive documentation support and content to guide you all the way.
- Managed Data Warehouse. While cloud data warehouses offer immense flexibility and opportunity, managing them can be a hassle without the right team and resources. If you do not want the trouble of managing them in-house, use our managed warehouse offering and get started today. Whenever you feel you are ready to do it in-house, simply configure your own warehouse and direct pipelines to it.
- Activate your data with Reverse ETL. Be future-ready and don’t let your data sit idle in the data warehouse or stay limited to your BI dashboards. The unidimensional approach toward data management is now undergoing a paradigm change. Instead, use DataChannel’s reverse ETL offering to send data to the tools your business teams use every day. Set up alerts & notifications on top of your data warehouse and sync customer data across all platforms converting your data warehouse into a powerful CDP (Customer Data Platform). You can even preview the data without ever leaving the platform.