In this post, we look at the importance of monitoring e-commerce visitors, which metrics to use, and which are the most suitable tools. Check it out!
Learning more about your clients’ profile, and monitoring every action they take in your online store, is a vital part of running this kind of business But do you know how to monitor your e-commerce visitors efficiently?
This process is much simpler in a physical store because you can see who comes in and goes out. Identifying them can be a little bit more complex with e-commerce, but this doesn’t mean it’s impossible.
If you’ve come this far, then you’ve already realised that you need to do some monitoring, but you’re not quite sure how. In this post, we look at the importance of monitoring e-commerce visitors, which metrics to use, and which are the most suitable tools. Check it out!
Contents
Why is monitoring e-commerce visitors important?
Monitoring e-commerce visitors is, without a doubt, the best way to get to know your clients’ profiles a little better, understand their preferences, and even discover consumer trends. All of this improves your brands’ competitiveness.
This information is vital for gauging the efficiency of your online store’s marketing strategy and spot potential flaws in the system, such as a high shopping cart abandonment rate.
If this rate is high, it could be that your shipping costs aren’t quite right, or there is a problem with the selected checkout, or even that transaction completion processes are too complicated.
But far beyond just collecting data, it needs to be understood and correlated in a logical and precise way. Otherwise, you’ll end up with lots of useless or misunderstood information that could undermine your marketing strategies.
Which metrics should you use?
You already know that monitoring is important. But what actually needs to be monitored anyway? The digital environment offers endless metrics, but not all of them are really relevant to you. Below are the most widely used:
Number of visitors
The first statistic to be monitored is the daily number of visitors to your e-commerce site. Whilst some marketing professionals consider this metric is too flattering (the high number of visits doesn’t mean a high number of sales), it’s important in identifying interest in the products on sale
Bounce rate
The bounce rate shows the number of visitors that came to your website but left without taking any further action (click, sign up, etc.). High bounce rates show that you are probably attracting the wrong kind of people to your online store.
Cases like this call for a reassessment of your target market and streamline your marketing campaigns if necessary.
Conversion rate
This is unquestionably the most important metric for any e-commerce. The conversion rate shows the percentage of users that took a certain action – or made a purchase, as is the case of an online store.
Average ticket value
Do you know the average spend of each visitor to your website? Well, you need to be aware that this metric should be regularly monitored because it can also useful to help you check if your cost planning is correct and if your prices are in line with it.
Customer acquisition cost (CAC)
Every purchase made in an online shop has a cost – and knowing this cost is vital for establishing a consistent pricing policy, in order to avoid losses. To calculate the CAC, everything that has been invested in order to make the sale must be taken into account.
What are the most suitable tools?
What you really want is to have all of this data to hand, right? We bet you do. But where can you get it? You need to use monitoring tools. See some of the examples below.
Google Analytics
This is a free website monitoring tool offered by Google (obviously!) Analytics allows you to gather a range of information regarding each access to any particular webpage.
To use it, you’ll need to create an account and generate a unique ID, which will be included in your website code It will enable them to monitor data such as:
- total website traffic;
- traffic source;
- geolocation access;
- browsers used;
- operating system;
- device (desktop, tablet, smartphone);
- bounce rate, etc.
With Google Analytics you can even set up conversion rates and monitor the sales performance of every product on offer.
E-GOI e-commerce tracking
This tool enables your e-commerce to recover inactive clients by automating their respective life-cycles. For example, you can send discounts or special offers to those who haven’t visited or haven’t bought from your e-commerce for a while, as well as simplified cross-selling campaigns.
Another advantage of e-commerce tracking is the possibility of monitoring a client that was in your online store but didn’t make a purchase. If the client goes into the physical store, the system sends a product discount coupon which will increase the shop’s conversion rate.
In relation to shopping cart abandonment, E-goi’s Track & Engage can trigger an email, SMS or a Web Push Notification to ask why the user behaved in this way. You even have the option of automatically offering a discount coupon.
Similar to Google analytics, monitoring is fairly simple to set up: just insert the HTML tracking code on the website. The tool will then register the pages visited by each user, as well as offering integration with a range of platforms, such as WordPress / WooCommerce.
To use Track & Engage, just create an account on the E-goi Platform.
SEMrush
SEMrush also uses monitoring but focuses on analysing e-commerce performance on search engines – on Google, to be exact. The tool analyses the website’s keywords and allows you to draw comparisons with those of its competitors.
The SEMrush report shows the website’s positioning in the search engine results, the best performing organic and paid keywords, and even improvements that can be made to position the virtual store amongst the top results.
This is a freemium tool. In other words, there is a free version with some limitations and a paid version which is much more complete.
As you have seen this article, it’s vital to monitor your e-commerce visitors to improve sales results, get to know your clients and differentiate your brand from the competition.
So there’s no time to lose! Get in touch with our team and start monitoring now!