We’ve said it before, and we’ll no doubt say it again—you can’t improve what you don’t measure. To grow your business and achieve your goals, you need to make good use of ecommerce reporting.
With this, you can accurately measure your progress and find out how well your strategies are working.
Thankfully, ecommerce analytics have moved on from manual input. Gone are the days of relying on excel spreadsheets and graphs. Now, there are advanced ecommerce reporting tools that make the life of a merchant much easier.
With ecommerce reporting, you can generate easily digested, actionable insights at the touch of a button. This allows you to concentrate on the big picture and act decisively with data-driven confidence.
However, with so much ecommerce data available at your fingertips, it’s difficult to know where to begin. Which ecommerce reports are the most relevant for cutting to the chase and boosting your bottom line?
In this article, we’ll discuss the most important ecommerce metrics to monitor. With these in mind, you’ll be better prepared to effectively interpret your reports and understand what actions need to be taken.
Why you need to start diving into your reports
Tracking sales is one thing, but to really understand what is driving your revenue you need to dig deeper into the details.
These details offer real insights into your strategies. They examine elements such as customer engagement and retention , your campaign and automation performance, and how users navigate your website.
Learning how to interpret different kinds of ecommerce data helps merchants in many ways. It helps you understand how different aspects of your business connect with and complement each other.
For example, insight into adjustments to timings. This includes a lagging automation workflow, which may give a real boost to your customer engagement. Ultimately, this could lead to an increase in both sales and retention.
When all is said and done, you can measure and optimize everything for the best results. This includes:
- Audience segments
- Email click rates
- Different channels
- Website performance
- CTAs
- The customer buying journey
We’ll cover reports that will help you monitor how your audience is interacting with your business in real-time—helping you understand exactly how your marketing strategies are playing out.
1. Get the big picture with your sales dashboard
Let’s start from the top. Your sales dashboard provides your most vital ‘big picture’ data—it gives you an overall view of your business performance in one, easy-to-access place.
With this most fundamental ecommerce report, you should be able to view things like:
- Total revenue, along with a comparison of revenue in the previous period
- Revenue from your total and individual campaigns
- Revenue from your total and individual automations
- Total store revenue
- Total orders placed
As well as sales data, you should have access to audience growth statistics on your dashboard. This includes your total number of subscribers, the number of new subscribers added, and the difference in added contacts for any selected period.
Use your dashboard to quickly access your most telling KPIs—the ones that give you an idea of the overall health of your business.
2. Understand your marketing performance with advanced reporting
You should strive to make your marketing as timely and relevant as possible. To do so, you should keep a close eye on how your current campaigns, automation, and channels are performing.
Advanced reporting allows you to dive deeper into the stats. They allow you to see which messages are getting opened, clicked, generating sales, and more.
Here you’ll find up-to-date, automatically sorted lists of your key email marketing metrics so you know exactly which of your strategies are working best.
Speaking of open rates, you should keep the rollout of iOS 15 in mind. This enables Apple users to turn off open tracking—this has all but killed off open rates for email marketing.
This will force marketers to adjust strategies that previously relied on data from open rates. Remember, this will particularly affect engagement-focused data, such as deliverability tracking and list hygiene .
One main takeaway is that these changes are a wake-up call for marketers who rely too much on just one channel like emails. It’s wise to form a truly omnichannel strategy with the addition of other channels.
Omnichannel marketing is proven to increase engagement statistics, with marketers using three channels or more in their campaigns earning impressive engagement rates of 18.96% . This is compared to just 5.4% for marketers using single-channel campaigns only.
Of course, going fully omnichannel requires regular tracking and comparisons of cross-channel performance.
Advanced reports allow you to do exactly that—presenting all of your KPIs split by channel.
This makes it easy to spot patterns and customer trends. These show insights into how customers interact with your business, which clarifies what adjustments are necessary to keep your omnichannel strategy functioning smoothly.
3. Understand your customer priorities with lifecycle stages
A successful business is a sustainable one, with a strong customer base that shops often and regularly interacts with your brand.
This makes customer retention a priority with your strategies. One of the best ways to boost customer retention is with customer lifecycle stages .
These give you a clear indication of who among your customer base needs to be re-engaged. With this in mind, you can reach out to them with personalized content and offers designed to keep them by your side.
It works by categorizing your customers into clear categories. These are based on their average order value (shopping frequency and spend) and recency of their shopping activity.
The easiest way to illustrate this is with the following lifecycle stages map.
As you can see, there are eight lifecycle stages and four accompanying strategies. With your customer base automatically organized in this way, it’s easy to target them with relevant campaigns.
For example, ‘cherish’ your champions and loyalists with perks and special content. ‘Re-activate’ your high-value ‘about to lose’ customers with tempting offers to keep them in the fold.
Use customer lifecycle stages to keep your subscribers engaged with the right messages at the right times. These reports are some of the most valuable and useful for helping you to prioritize your marketing efforts to the areas that need it most.
4. Understand how customers progress in the buying journey
Visualizing your sales funnel helps in many ways. For one, you can pinpoint exactly where your potential and current customers fall off on their path to purchase. This gives you valuable insights into which areas to improve.
For example, let’s say you have a lot of potential customers who are just window-shopping but don’t add items to their carts. You may need to optimize your marketing messages and calls to action.
Another example is seeing customers placing items in their carts but not completing the purchase. This suggests that you need to streamline your checkout procedure or optimize your abandoned cart automation.
Understanding how your customers progress throughout their buying journey helps categorize customers into various funnel stages, such as:
- Inactive
- Aware
- Interested
- Intending
- Purchased
You can take these insights and act on them with customer segments that target a specific funnel stage. These allow you to create focused and personalized messaging that purposefully guides customers—along their journey towards making a purchase.
Carefully examine customer journeys and consider which funnel stage they’re at. Use your insights to spot weak points and bottlenecks in your customers’ journeys. With these weak spots in mind, optimize them for more engagement and increased conversions.
5. Understand what’s happening on your website
Is your website navigation as smooth and logical as it could be? Are your users finding the information they need to make an easy and hassle-free purchase?
You can find the answers to these questions with website visitor tracking . This provides plenty of insights, including:
- How many active visitors are currently online
- How many visitors came to your store within a certain period of time
- How your visitors are browsing your store in real-time
For example, when someone enters your store, you’ll see exactly which pages, product categories, or items that they’re viewing. This gives you valuable insights into the usability of your website—helping you to understand your visitors’ buying intentions.
You can then use this information to target shoppers who don’t complete a purchase. You can use browse abandonment, product abandonment, and cart abandonment automation emails.
These automated emails are proven and effective means of boosting conversion rates and are having a huge impact on ecommerce sales. If you aren’t making use of them, you should be.
Dig deeper into the details, as ecommerce tracking provides a variety of useful insights. For example, insights into whether your CTAs are getting noticed and clicked on, and which products are getting the most attention.
These insights can benefit your overall user experience too, showing whether visitors are making use of your various menus, FAQs, and ‘About Us’ pages.
The more information you can gather about your website’s navigability and how visitors are interacting with it, the better you can make their overall user experience.
Wrap up
Gathering data is one thing, but learning how to effectively leverage it to drive your strategies and optimize your results is the key to increasing your revenue.
Your marketing automation platform should come equipped with a suite of ecommerce reporting tools. They should both provide you with data but automatically process and present it, along with providing actionable, ecommerce-focused insights.
These are often specifically designed to boost your sales and engagement—Omnisend does just that.
Omnisend features all of the reports mentioned above as well as advanced, omnichannel marketing automation to help you take full advantage of your customer intelligence. Get started for free today and reap the benefits of intuitive, in-depth ecommerce reporting.