Which products should we feature on the Home page? Where should the CTA button go? What should our live chatbot say? When should this discount pop-up appear?
Without website analytics, you’d probably just make an educated guess or go with your gut, right?
Yikes.
Your success in driving sales hinges on the online shopping experience you create for customers. So, why would you leave your success to chance?
This is where data has the answers.
By simply knowing where to look and how to use website analytics tools, you can make data-driven decisions that get results. And by results, we mean more sales, less wasted time and money, and seriously impressed customers.
So, what’s holding you back from learning about website analytics for your eCommerce site?
“It’s boring.” “It’s hard.” “It sucks.”
True – until now. We created this useful guide to break this thing down without boring you to death. Who knows, this might even be fun.
Let’s get into it.
Let’s start with two stone-cold facts:
There’s a tsunami-level surge of online sales happening right now, but only the best eCommerce websites will catch the wave. The rest, well…
Website analytics brings order to the chaos of design decisions facing you and your team.
By tracking, grouping, and analyzing the trail of digital breadcrumbs left by your visitors, website analytics tools give you insights in just a few clicks.
You’ll have instant answers to those big questions:
With website analytics at your fingertips, you can create a site that is built on the tangible evidence of your customers’ preferences. That’s powerful.
You don’t need us to tell you that customers crave personalized experiences. With access to the data behind your audience’s behavior, you have the intel you need to tailor your website to increase engagement and conversions.
To summarise, website analytics helps you –
Now that we’ve covered the what and why of website analytics, let’s dive into the how. This is how you can use website analytics to improve your website and drive sales.
When using website analytics, A/B testing will give you the most accurate results as to which strategies and design elements are most effective.
Now, you have clear data that demonstrates which variant gets the best response from real users.
To get the full picture of your website’s performance, you need to understand what messages are attracting customers to your site in the first place.
Click-through rate = Total measured clicks/Total number of impressions x 100
You’re probably using a combination of email drip campaigns, Google AdWords, social media posts, and paid social media ads to drive traffic to your site.
By measuring the CTR of each campaign, you can see:
With this information, you can start making strategic, data-driven decisions based on the results.
Instagram performing better than Facebook? Allocate more spend to that channel.
Are customers engaging more with ads that showcase your product features than your product discounts? Highlight your product’s benefits in both your ads and your website content.
Do customers respond better to animations and videos than text posts? Incorporate more graphic design into your ads.
This is a powerful metric for eCommerce businesses. Almost 70% of shoppers abandon their carts (come on, we all do it).
Tracking the fluctuations in this metric will help you ascertain what design decisions can help you recover important revenue opportunities.
First, set up a tool that captures the abandonment rate in two places – pre-checkout and post-checkout.
| Abandonment Metric | Potential objections | How to solve with web design |
| Pre-checkout | Purchasing the item isn’t a priority, they’re looking for a cheaper deal elsewhere, they’ve changed their mind. | Pop-ups that indicate scarcity (eg. only ten items left in stock!), a price guarantee, a sale countdown |
| Post-checkout | Shipping is too expensive, the checkout flow is too time-consuming, delivery takes too long. | Upsell opportunities in exchange for free shipping, simplify the checkout workflow, send remarketing emails |
As you can see, the two metrics reveal different objections that can be tackled with different web design strategies.
Tracking abandonment and using that data to drive your design strategies is a powerful way to retarget customers and drive sales.
Remember, half of cart abandoners will make the purchase when asked. If you haven’t started sending cart abandonment emails, make it your priority right now.
Conversion rates are like the litmus test for eCommerce web design and development. If you implement a new feature and see a bump in conversions – congratulations, you’ve just won at web design!
To truly understand which aspects of your website are working effectively, you should test conversion rates on your:
Once you’ve established your conversion rates for these pages, you can start experimenting with different design strategies and then re-test to see what gets results.
Here are some kickass tactics to maximize conversions:
Remember, using A/B testing will give you a clear view of which web design element gets the most conversions.
Everyone starts somewhere. Even the hottest brands in the eCommerce game had cringe-worthy web design moments.
And when you’re building the greatest eCommerce website in history, you need to know when your pages are just, well, crap.
What’s the easiest way to tell if your web page is crap? Well, people take one look and…
Yeah, it’s not every day Urban Dictionary correctly defines a website analytics term – but here we are.
High bounce rates are a tell-tale sign that your landing pages or sales pages aren’t working because people are immediately clicking away.
Bounce rates are a powerful way to identify that there’s a problem. But, finding the solution to this will be more challenging and often depends on what you’re trying to achieve with the page.
Let’s take a look at some tried-and-tested strategies to minimize bounce rate on your eCommerce website:
Once you get over the initial cringe of a high bounce rate, this is a powerful metric to drive your web design strategy.
This is where it’s crucial to have a results-driven web design agency on your side. They’ll create a clear process to tackle the barriers preventing visitors from navigating your site and making a purchase.
Unlike some website analytics terms, this one does what it says on the tin. By knowing your average order value, you can direct your web design strategies to bump those rookie numbers up.
To maximize your average order value with web design, present upselling opportunities that are highly convenient to your customer.
Here are some clever ideas:
| Tactic | Example |
| Offer product bundles and advertise the discount compared to buying them separately | Manscaped offers men’s grooming kits with ‘free gifts’, highlighting the value that the customer gets for free. |
| Recommend complementary items when a product is added to the cart | When a customer adds an item to their bag, Sephora immediately recommends similar products to complete a makeup look. |
| Provide free shipping or discounts for a higher total purchase | Daniel Wellington’s home page immediately offers 20% and 25% off at higher purchase thresholds |
Now, we’ll cover three website analytics metrics that are specific to chatbots. If you haven’t considered a chatbot before, check out these stats:
To drive sales, it’s crucial that eCommerce brands prioritize chatbot data and tactics into their website analytics. Let’s keep going.
This metric shows you how long it takes for your chatbot to respond to a customer.
Imagine if you walked into a store, asked a salesperson a question, and they just:
Awkward, huh?
Customers expect a swift response. If your chatbot takes a while to respond because your team is underresourced or your automation isn’t up to scratch, customer loyalty and sales will drop.
Minimizing response time is crucial to developing a stellar customer experience on your site. With an understanding of how long it takes for your chatbot to respond, you can start making data-driven decisions to optimize your website.
Here are a few ideas:
If you’re investing in a chatbot on your eCommerce site, you want to know that your customers are benefitting from it.
And, let’s face it, you need to know if you’re getting bang for your buck from this newfangled website integration.
Calculating chat to conversion rate is simply ascertaining how many conversions came directly from a chatbot conversation.
With this data, you can start implementing tactics to maximize conversions from your chatbot.
At this point, it helps to have a savvy web development agency on board to show you what AI and automation tools can help.
Need some direction? We have a few tips:
No one wants to spend their evening talking to a chatbot. The key to driving sales with a chatbot is ensuring that customers get answers and make decisions quickly.
And if you’re hiring sales agents to take care of chatbot conversations – time is money.
Average resolution time helps inform your web design decisions to apply a strategy to your chatbot and get results faster.
This is what we mean:
As eCommerce evolves at an unprecedented speed, it’s never been more crucial to stay on top of industry developments and provide the best possible experience to customers.
By interpreting the data behind your website’s performance, and using it to inform your web design decisions, your brand is in a prime position for growth.
So, who’s going to take care of this for you? The good news is, you don’t need to hire a data analyst or R2D2 to make sense of the numbers.
You just need a responsive web design agency that knows what works.
State Creative builds intuitive, responsive, kick-ass eCommerce websites for ambitious brands. But, more than that, we provide dedicated technical support to enhance your online presence long after your site has launched.
With the latest website analytics tools, we’ll show you how to make data-driven web design decisions. Your website won’t just look incredible – it’ll get results.
Sound good? Good. Let’s talk.
