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5 min read

10 Examples Of Digital Marketing Analytics For Ecommerce

By Ben Aston
QUICK SUMMARY

An introduction to digital marketing analytics to help you understand what they are, who uses them, and why, along with key terms.

TABLE OF CONTENTS What is digital marketing analytics? How digital marketing analytics are used Digital marketing analytics glossary
10 Examples of Digital Marketing Analytics for Ecommerce-01

When you work in the world of ecommerce, digital analytics is something you should master and utilize daily. You'll find digital analytics crucial to your work and in your marketing efforts to grow your site traffic and sales.

If you’re hoping to grow your online sales, you simply cannot ignore digital analytics. They are a solid and successful marketing tool that makes life in a virtual world much easier.

What Is Digital Marketing Analytics?

Digital marketing analytics is the process of analyzing data gathered from the online world. This data gives valuable insights into how your customers or users are acting. Using these insights, you can track behaviors and identify what's working for your company and what isn't.

Take this data seriously, as it will help you improve your visitor's online experience, using data-driven metrics to generate leads and convert them into customers.

Digital analytics tools are used by businesses can use to collect, assess, measure, and analyze qualitative observations data along with quantitative numbers.

Once you have this data, you can create and set a plan to improve your business operations by offering a greatly improved online experience for visitors to your site. Here are the types of analytics data that can be used:

Examples of Digital Marketing Analytics for Ecommerce

  • Website traffic: Lets you know what campaigns work and which ones do not.

  • Traffic by source: Where do your visitors come from? Organic? Direct? Referral? Social?

  • New vs. returning visitors: Shows your relevance and piece performance.

  • Sessions: Number of visits your site gets.

  • Average length of the session: Knowing how long a visitor spends on your site helps understand navigation and ease of use.

  • Pageviews: How many times does a user visit the same page?

  • Pages with most visits: Helps show behavior flow.

  • Exit rate: Shows when and where someone left your site to identify where a loss of interest may occur.

  • Bounce rate: Percentage of people who leave after only one page. This can show where issues on the page lie, such as slow loading or broken links.

  • Conversion rate: How many visitors turn into sales.

In Which Scenarios Are Digital Marketing Analytics Used?

Digital marketing analytics should be used in any online business. Whether you are the marketing manager or a top-level executive, analytics can be used to set out a path and marketing plan for the whole company. There are many scenarios in which digital analytics can be applied.

A marketing manager the data to understand sales and where the issues are that are holding potential customers back from completing sales. Knowing where they are abandoning their carts, or showing disinterest in online marketing campaigns, means you can reformat how things are being done.

Analytics became a significant part of the marketing manager's job when the world of business went to ecommerce and big data started to become a thing. You cannot do a good job in marketing if you don’t know how the site works and your customers behave.

  • If you are in an executive position, digital analytics can be used for reporting, budgeting, and justifying staffing changes.
  • If you see analytics tools telling you that digital marketing campaigns are not working or if prices are seen as too high and people are leaving without a purchase, you will know where there are issues.
  • If there is an overwhelmingly high bounce rate, it may be time to look at your website developer and content staff.

Digital marketing and ecommerce guru Colleen Romero weighs in on the various metrics within digital analytics, saying,

"The most important metric is conversion rate. It should be trending up or staying consistent, depending on where you are with your ecommerce initiatives. Seasonality should also be considered. If the conversion rate begins to drop, then I would suggest looking at the bounce rate and top exit pages as a start. You should also gather feedback from customers to further inform your analysis and troubleshooting."

By understanding where the trouble lies, you can budget to improve those areas, increase sales, or hire staff to meet the company's needs.

Digital Marketing Analytics Terms

Algorithm: A statistical process or math formula that lets you analyze data.

Anomaly detection: Finding outlying items or events that don’t fit with the other data. There is no pattern.

Batch processing: A way to process high amounts of data from transactions gathered over a period of time.

Clustering analysis: Identifying objects with similarities and putting them in clusters to figure out their differences and similarities in data.

Data: This can be sales numbers, marketing research, readings from tracking equipment, website user behavior, market projections, demographics, and lists of customers.

Data analytics: Assessing big data sets to find patterns, correlations, trends, etc. It can be behavioral, descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, or prescriptive.

Data as a Service (DaaS):  DaaS providers use cloud options to give data to customers on demand.

Data integration: Combining data from various sources for presentation as a single source.

Database: A digital gathering of data and how it is organized. The data is entered into a database management system.

Exploratory analysis: Analysis focused on identifying basic patterns in data that include outliers and unanticipated items.

Real-time data: Data that is read, processed, analyzed, and seen in milliseconds.

Software as a Service (SaaS): Enables businesses to host an application and make it available via the cloud.

Final Thoughts

If you want your company to lead the way in the ecommerce era, you need to use digital analytics to build and grow your online real estate.

Understanding how your customers behave and your site is working is necessary. Using digital marketing analytics gives you the insight you need to adjust your platforms, products, and business as needed. You get to see what works and what doesn’t.

Take your ecommerce business to the next level by learning to gather and analyze data.

Find this useful? For further insights on digital analytics, as well as advice from industry leaders and other goings-on in the world of ecommerce, subscribe to The Ecomm Manager Newsletter.

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By Ben Aston

I'm the Co-Founder of The Ecomm Manager. I've been in the digital industry for more than 20 years working in the UK at London’s top digital agencies including Dare, Wunderman, Lowe and DDB. I’ve delivered everything from film to CMS', games to advertising and eCRM to eCommerce sites. I’ve been fortunate enough to work across a wide range of great clients; automotive brands including Land Rover, Volkswagen and Honda; Utility brands including BT, British Gas and Exxon, FMCG brands such as Unilever, and consumer electronics brands including Sony.

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