How to Use Product Analytics for
Product Management

7 Min. Read

eCommerce Product Analytics and product management is tough, especially in large stores.  Of course its all relative to your experience and knowledge. For example, a few weeks ago I received a phone call from an eCommerce store owner, he started by asking a relatively simple question of “how can I find my most popular products“, of course it got more difficult from there:

“I have more +1000 product on my website, how do I know which ones are performing well? How do I improve the failing ones? If I have to make changes what should I do? I have so many products and the finite amount of time, it is so confusing”.

I completely understand how confusing that can be, nowadays huge numbers come in fast, from so many different sources.

The amount of data generated by an eCommerce store is just overwhelming. Data from the store, Google Analytics, CRM metrics, customers’ data,  your products, and inventory…

All of this data can drive you crazy.

hate ecommerce analytics

Especially when it comes to analyzing it, and you don’t know what to do and how to start.

But as Dean Kamen said, “every once in a while, a new technology, an old problem, and a big idea turn into an innovation.”.

In this blog post, I will reveal the secrets about product data, talk about eCommerce Product Analytics, eCommerce marketing KPIs, and provide optimization options for each part of these pillars, ultimately its a guide to product management.

Table of Contents

Product data and optimization

product data
One of my very first tips  when it comes to products, and you need to identify which of your products are the most popular products and the best performing, they are your ‘Star products’  (their conversion rate is always higher than average) and which of them ‘Need to improve’  (have a worse conversion rate than the site average).
 
Don’t forget to separate the products that have zero movements in the period we’ve looked, which means that no one bought them.

Once you have grouped your products as mentioned above you can dig deeper into how to deal with each one of those products and groups.

Star Products

5 stars
The star products have the best metrics in your store; they are purchased the most and their product page has the highest conversion rate, as well. [Conversion Rate: The conversion rate is the percentage of users who take the desired action. The archetypical example of conversion rate is the percentage of website visitors who buy something on the site.]

What should you do with your star products to get the most out of your website?

Your star products give the biggest scale of your income and drag up your average conversion rate.

You can do 3 things with your star products:

  1. Continuously review and improve them to keep their star ranking.
  2. Get the most out of them, – increase visibility by scaling up advertising expenditure.
  3. Analyze them to find some key elements that can make your other products stars as well.

Products You Need to Improve

2 out of 5

These are the products with a lot of visitors, but low conversion rates. You should discover why they are failing and optimize them to improve their performance.

As has already been mentioned, not all of your products, perform outstandingly.

There are some that are below the average and although sometimes these products are sold as well, still based on the number of visitors on the product page, it would be expected more purchases than it has to be made.

They definitely need some improvement or repair.

How can you improve these products?

Answer these questions, they’ll help you improve them :

  • Are the product priced well?
  • Do you provide enough information in the product description?
  • Are the layout of your product page logical with easy to find elements?
  • Are there enough photos with a high enough resolution?
  • Are you building trust and credibility with reviews and third-party certifications?

Inactive Products

Regard to the number of product in your store; there will be some of them which become inactive.

Here you can find two kinds of product list: those that have never been purchased or those that have been purchased before but not in the chosen period. Why should we control the inactive products?

It’s the end of the season, and the demand has decreased. In this case, you have to wait for the next season. There was a technical issue on your website making your product page inaccessible or unstable.

Things like these should be taken seriously as this affects user experience.

shopping-experience

The positive online shopping experience is what we always aim for.

Always carry out a review of failures such as a technical glitch to know how to prevent this in the future.

It’s worth managing the new inactive products and resolve any bottlenecks discovered immediately before they can cause a big revenue decrease, or worse, lose some loyal customers.

These are the parts you should pay attention to when it comes to your products pages.

You should understand the numbers behind it and how to optimize it based on the core metrics.

Marketing Data and Optimization

Beyond optimizing the products and customer experience on your site, you can also use data-driven decisions to optimize your marketing strategy.

Knowing which traffic sources and marketing tools result in most customers can help you decide where to spend your time and resources. It’s a vital question for eCommerce store owners as marketing often comprises a large part of the budget.

Thankfully, eCommerce optimization allows capturing the traffic source or marketing channel for each visitor on your site.

ecommerce-product-analytics

Use Keywords With the Highest PSI in Your SEO Campaign

PSI (Potential SEO Index) tells you which keywords have the greatest potential. This shows you how likely you are to be ranked first, and how much revenue growth you can expect.

Although these are only estimates, they provide a starting point for which keywords you should use.

Your non-converting keywords are keywords that direct visitors to a page which doesn’t convert.

For category or product page that allows people to add an item to their cart, this can indicate a problem.

You may need to optimize the landing page for the keyword, or you need to find keywords that convert better.

Best Performing Channels

While some analytics software can provide information on traffic source, it’s important to also know which of these traffic source has the best conversion rate.

Seeing clearly which source provides the most visitors than become customers is the key to ensure your marketing strategy is efficient.

marketing report

The performance of each marketing channel can vary over time, even based on the day of the week.

In the chart above, you can see that some marketing channels, in particular, ‘Social’, perform better on Friday and Saturday.

We also see that this marketing channel has performed worse over the given time period.

Given this information, we might consider putting more attention to social media on Friday and Saturday, perhaps running a special offer for social media followers with a discount to encourage more revenue from this channel.

As I said: eCommerce Product Management is hard.

All of this data makes the process of collecting, studying and analyzing it almost impossible.
integrations

Because it is too much as I said in the introduction.

Data comes from different sources and you don’t know which ones are urgent or which ones you should pay more attention to.

In brief, your dashboard will be a mess. Consequently, you need to have an analytical eCommerce tool to manage this complicated task for you.

Conversific helps eCommerce site owners to unlock hidden revenue in their data and boost their store’s performance by delivering actionable business insights. It’s about knowing your customers and appropriate product management.

converdific_facebook_ads_03

It provides solutions such as:

  • Displaying eCommerce based data in one business dashboard
  • Converting the collected information from big data to comprehensive data overview
  • Delivering smart insights about products, categories, marketing channels, and customers.

There are several platforms that make it easy to capture data and analytics about the eCommerce site.

But the thing about Conversific, it gives you actionable information about how you can use this data to optimize your store, thereby increasing your revenue.

To put it simply, Conversific collects all the important eCommerce data and KPIs, store it, analyze it and deliver it as actionable eCommerce insights and tips, so online retailers can optimize their stores accordingly.

The insights on Conversific dashboard covers the 4 success factors of growth:

  • Product optimization: to find out which products are the best in your store and which need improvements.
  • Category optimization: to learn about which category performs better than the others.
  • Marketing optimization: to identify which marketing channel brings the best conversion rate or which keyword needs to be used in your campaigns.
  • Customer optimization: in order to discover who are the best customers in your store and get to know their loyalty level, and to identify those who didn’t buy from you again recently.

Conclusion

In brief, I’ve always been of the opinion that there is revenue hiding in every eCommerce store. You have to dig deeper into your analytics and leverage it to optimize your eCommerce store.

The Author

Marketing and Profit Analytics for Shopify and WooCommerce Stores

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