Ecommerce Analytics
The Definitive Guide 2022

Deciding on where to allocate marketing spend is certainly not a walk in the park.

For example, You’ll find countless articles on the internet claiming that social media has become “pay-to-play”, which encourages business owners to spend more on ads.

Although there is some truth to those claims, many business owners still spend money without blindly and see little to no return on investment.

This isn’t just exclusive to social media.

This goes for every marketing channel.

That’s why the importance of actionable data cannot be overstated.

Once you’ve defined your business goals, set up a great data collection system, and know your audience, you’ll be in a better position to know EXACTLY where to spend money to boost your marketing efforts.

Speaking of marketing spend, let’s get into some important e-commerce acquisition metrics.

Top e-commerce acquisition metrics

1) Visitors

This is the total number of times a user navigates to your website.

As an e-commerce store owner, you’ve got to know how many people are coming to your website, where they’re from, and on which device so that you can serve them better.

2) Transactions

A transaction can be defined as a sale or purchase of a good/service.

This is when your visitors become customers.

3) Revenue

Revenue is the income generated from the sale of goods and services before any costs and expenses are deducted.

Careful to not confuse this metric with profit.

Profit is achieved when there’s a positive balance after deducting expenses from revenue.

4) AVG Order Value

This metric helps you understand your customer’s spending habits and can help you to indentify opportunities to upsell, downsell, and make tailored offers to them.

To find out your AOV, divide the sum of generated revenue by the total number of orders.

5) Unique purchases

Unique Purchases refers to the total number of times a product (or set of products) was part of a transaction.

Here’s a good example from the team at Marketing Mojo:

“If you see that product A has been purchased 500 times, but only has 10 unique purchases, it means that product A was bought on 10 separate occasions in quantities of 50 at a time.”

6) Conversion Rate

This metric indicates the percentage of visitors that come to your site who become actual customers.

In order to find your conversion rate, you need to take the total number of sales divided by the total number of visits to your site.

7) Customer Acquisition Cost

Customer Acquisition Cost or CAC refers to the overall cost to acquire a customer including the cost of producing, storing, and shipping the items that a customer purchases.

This metric can sometimes be overlooked but is a very telling measure of the likelyhood of a business’ success.

If it costs you more to acquire customers than the value (revenue) those customers bring, you’re going to be in trouble very soon.

The team over at BigCommerce has a helpful guide on how to achieve a positive CAC here if you want to read more about this.

8) Return On Advertising Spend

Return On Advertising Spend or ROAS measures the efficacy of your digital advertising campaign.

This tangible measure lets you know what’s working in your campaigns and how you can fix it.

To calculate ROAS, You take the revenue generated from a campaign and divide it by the cost of the campaign; the number that you get from that calculation is the ROAS.

How to measure Customer Acquisition Costs in e-commerce?

I’ve mentioned how you can calculate Customer Acquisition Cost above, but if you want to dig deeper, check out this article by Neil Patel that gives you a better picture at how this metric can determine your company’s fate.

You’ll learn the importance of improving on-site conversion metrics, enhancing customer value, and properly using your CRM to raise your CAC.

Google Analytics Acquisition Reports

In Google Analytics, you can find 10 separate reporting sections under acquisition.

That means that you can easily discover the marketing tactics that are bringing the most customers to your site and double down on them. Social Media Examiner has assembled this practical guide on using Google Analytics Acquisition reports to help you identify the marketing techniques that are bringing the most visitors and leads to your website.

Google Ads

Google Ads (formerly as AdWords) is a popular marketing channel for businesses of all sizes.

As the undisputed search engine in most of the world, there’s a pretty good chance your target customers uses Google.

Over the years, Google Ads have grown in popularity and thus price, so it’s important to note that it can very easy to waste money on Google Ads that do not bring in the customers you want.

With the proper customer and market research, you’ll be able to correctly invest in Google Ads with a more measured approach.

To check the success of your campaigns, you’ll need to link your Google Ads account to our dear friend, Google Analytics.

When properly done, you’ll have access to a rich set of actionable data that will help you tweak your campaigns to get the most bang for your buck.

Here’s how you can do that.

Facebook Ads

Facebook boasts an incredible arsenal of analytics tools to help you get the results you want from your paid marketing efforts.

To fully take advantage of their tools, you’ll need to understand how Facebook’s analytics tools are broken up and what metrics are the most important in each analytics subdivision.

The three analytics platforms on Facebook are Page Insights, Audience Insights, and Ad Manager.

Due to the large amount of information these analytics platforms dish out, it’s easy to be overwhelmed.

Use this guide to help you focus on the metrics that are most important.

Display Ads

Display ads usually have the goal of getting the user to click-through the ad and take an action on a landing page.

All good marketing strategies require setting goals and display ads are no different.

In order to have success with display ads, you’ll need to set some solid, measurable goals. Some common goals for display ads include:

• Brand awareness
• Freebies or lead magnets (ex: 5 powerful ways to write engaging web copy, etc)
• Attracting abandoned users through custom retargeting
• Lead nurturing

After you’ve set those goals, you’ll need to make sure you’re using the right targeting methods (such as keywords, demographics, interests, etc)  and catchy copy that will prompt the user to take the wanted action.

Here’s a handy guide on using data to supercharge your display ad campaigns from landing page experts, Instapage.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization is the process of affecting the visibility of a site in a web search engine’s unpaid search results.

Many people often think that SEO is simply about looking at high performing keywords and stuffing as many of them as possible in order to rank high on search engines like Google.

It’s not that simple, and simply stuffing as many keywords into a piece of content or ad can actually hurt your website’s visibility instead of helping it.

Carefully studying relevant keywords, creating helpful content (long form, short form, rich visuals, etc ), and writing focused, rich copy for ads are all part of a strong SEO strategy.

And what’s one of the best ways to measure your SEO efforts?

You guessed it…..Google Analytics. Among it’s multitude of reporting options lies the ability to dissect the keywords and organic traffic that impact your business.

Using Google Analytics to find out things like clicks, impressions, average page positions can go a long way in making your website favorable to search engines.

To dive deeper into understanding things like quality of traffic and creating custom SEO dashboards in Google Analytics, check out this guide.

Social Media

There are so many social networks out there that it’s difficult to keep up with them all.

Even more difficult for e-commerce business owners is knowing which metrics to focus on when investing in social media marketing.

Here’s the thing, you don’t need to be on every single social media platform.

You just need to be on the ones that are working for you.

There are plenty of businesses out there who are simply on 1-2 social media networks and are killing it.

This only happens when you’ve done your due diligence (audience research, market fit, competitor analysis, etc) and have a social media marketing strategy in place.

Without these things, social media can be black hole that just absorbs your time and money.

Lucky for you,  the teams at Sprout Social and Convince and Convert have come up with detailed guides on the social media metrics that matter.

In these guides, you’ll find how to track important social media metrics using Google Analytics.

Is Email Marketing “dead”?

Despite the barrage of articles that say so, email marketing is far from being “dead”.

Email marketing is one of the best ways for business owners to converse with their audience.

When someone opts into your email list, it usually means that they’re interested in learning more about you and what you have to offer.

It’s often the first place where you get to make a solid first impression to a potential customer.

Email can be a powerful tool when you’ve figured out how to create content for your list that isn’t just a crappy email announcing a sale you’re having that week.

Just as important as the content itself is the ability to track your efforts and seeing where you can improve your open rate, click-through rate, and reply rate.

This guide by Campaign Monitor breaks down how you can easily set up email campaign monitoring using Google Analytics.

To learn more about the most important email marketing metrics, check this great resource out by marketing leaders, HubSpot.

You’ll learn how to track conversion, rate, email share rate, and much more!

Referral & Direct

Referral traffic can be defined as traffic that has come from links on other websites rather than directly or from searches.

In Google Analytics, direct traffic is often reported as traffic that has no data on how the session arrived at your website or when the referring traffic has been configured to be ignored.

The most common causes of direct traffic are often manually entered web addresses, broken tracking codes, and non-web documents. Both referral and direct traffic can be excellent sources of new leads for your business and can give you insights into the most popular content and influencers in your industry.

It’s important to learn how to understand referral paths so you can clearly track good referral traffic and avoid bad referral spam.

The big picture: Multi-channel funnels

Put simply, multi-channel funnels show you how your marketing channels (aka trafffic source) work together to generate sales or other outlined conversion goals.

Often times, the last touchpoint before the conversion gets all the credit but that may not be the entire story.

Knowing things like how much time the user spent from the first visit until the purchase goes a long way in helping you optimize your marketing strategy.

This guide from the team at Online Metrics reveals the best way to go about creating a solid multi-channel funnel reporting system.

Remember that multi-channel funnels can get extremely complicated and is a more advanced technique once you get familiar with Google Analytics.

How to steal good ideas from competitors to get the upper hand

In the battle for the customer’s attention and loyalty, you’ve got to know what your competitors are doing.

This allows you to better understand not just your business but gives you the necessary information to seize untapped opportunities.

Setting clear goals, understanding exactly who your competition is, speaking to your competitors’ customers are all strategies that will help you stay ahead.

Be careful to not be a slave and becoming reactive to what your competitors are doing.

Finding smart ways to add competitive analysis into your regular audience and market research will save you time and unnecessary stress.

Here are some of the best ways to conduct thorough competitive analysis.

Always keep in mind that doing the research alone is not enough; it’s about taking that data and putting it to work in your business.