What Are Ecommerce Analytics?

Ecommerce analytics programs are digital tools that measure, analyze, and report on key performance indicators (KPIs) related to the health of your digital shelf.

The digital shelf is a term for all the online touch points your shoppers use to discover, engage with, and ultimately purchase from your brand. Ecommerce analytics assess the strength of critical aspects of the digital shelf, generating reports on product content quality or shopper engagement. They’re also sometimes referred to as digital shelf analytics.

Ecommerce analytics matter because without them, brands lack visibility of what aspects of their digital shelf are working, what needs to be improved, and what’s potentially incorrect or out-of-date. If they want to learn these things without analytics, brands must conduct manual reviews of large troves of data and look at individual product pages. By the time any conclusions can be drawn from this slow process, they may already be outdated.

With ecommerce analytics, brands can get essential knowledge about their digital shelf performance in minutes.

Modern commerce is expansive and complicated. Keeping track of metrics on every site you’re selling on is an overwhelming process, let alone analyzing those metrics for specific ways to improve your performance. Ecommerce analytics are essential for automating the process of both tracking important metrics and turning those metrics into actionable information.

There are several areas where ecommerce analytics can help.

Evaluating the Customer Journey

Analytics can reveal which product page elements work and which require improvements. By scraping data off the site, ecommerce analytics tools may help you uncover issues you wouldn’t have otherwise known to look for, such as user experience (UX) choices that confuse shoppers from discovery and consideration to decision.

Keeping Product Content Accurate and Compliant

Every retailer has different requirements for product content, and these requirements can change with little notice. Good ecommerce analytics tools will be able to analyze your live content across the digital shelf and compare it to your source of truth to assess if what is displayed is what you intended and automatically flag inconsistencies. 

Digital shelf analytics software can also check to make sure your content is consistent and accurate between product pages and across all retailers.

Tracking Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Performance

Algorithms are constantly getting updated, so your SEO practices need to be constantly updated too. Analytics tools that evaluate your content’s discoverability and share of search help you stay on top of SEO trends on both Google and individual retailer platforms to ensure your products rank as highly as possible.

Constantly Improving Your Content

Content that’s clear and engaging draws a shopper in and helps them envision owning your product. Ecommerce analytics solutions help you assess the quality of each piece of content on your product page, creating reports based on known best practices and user behavior. You can use this data to drive content improvements that lead to more conversions.

Ask yourself the following questions to determine if your organization could benefit from an ecommerce analytics solution.

• Do you struggle to obtain actionable insights about product page performance?
• Are you unsure why some product pages are more successful at driving sales than others?
• Do you struggle to keep your product pages optimized for search?
• Is it difficult to keep product content accurate and compliant?
• Do your shoppers show particularly high bounce rates?
• Do you want to empower your teams with better data and to take action?

The concrete benefits of ecommerce analytics are numerous, but each one ultimately leads to a growth in sales. There are several benefits of ecommerce analytics if they are wielded wisely.

More Traffic to Your Product Pages

Analytics give you the insights you need to improve your SEO and tailor your marketing strategies to rank higher on retailer sites, thereby getting more eyes on your product pages.

More Engagement With Your Product Pages

With analytics into your content’s performance, you’ll know how to optimize content to capture the attention of your target audience. You can use analytics reports to improve existing content and figure out gaps that could be filled with new forms of enhanced content. This ultimately leads to more customer engagement and a longer time on the page.

Minimized Customer Complaints or Confusion

Analytics solutions can help you maintain accuracy and keep content up-to-date across all retailers so shoppers will always have a clear understanding of exactly what you are offering and how it can serve them. The decrease in confusion could result in a lower return rate or fewer customer service requests.

Better Internal Collaboration and Improved Processes

When everyone on your team is working off the same analytics reports, there will be more consensus as to what needs to be done to grow sales. If your analytics engine is integrated with other ecommerce tools, you can even collaborate on the next steps in one centralized location.

More Conversions

When content is optimized, your shoppers will be more likely to find what they need and understand why it’s the best choice for them. This can help put your business in the best position to boost conversions.

Each analytics solution has strengths, but there are a few criteria we recommend looking for across the board.

Keep Compliance

This is the most important step of the selection process. The brands that meet retailers’ requirements get the most views, so it’s important to know how well your content performs against their standards. You should select an analytics solution that can report on the quality of all your content on all retailer sites according to the most up-to-date standards retailers have published.

Analyze To Optimize — and Drive Conversions

The fundamental role of an ecommerce analytics solution is to automate the process of analyzing and optimizing your content across the digital shelf. Well-optimized content is, of course, critical to driving conversions. Any solution you consider should highlight the factors that matter most to your brand, especially in terms of content quality and accuracy.

Assess SEO Standings

Discoverability is one of the most important factors influencing how many sales you make, and you can’t improve your SEO if you don’t receive frequent SEO reports. Your digital shelf analytics software should be able to reveal what your share of search is and whether your product content needs to be further optimized for search.

Access Comprehensive Reports

You don’t have time to work through highly technical, overly complicated reports. A good ecommerce analytics solution will present its findings in a way that’s intuitive and user-friendly.

Supports Product Experience Management

No ecommerce solution exists in a vacuum, so it shouldn’t be purchased in a vacuum, either. You need an analytics tool that integrates with your content creation, management, and syndication solutions. This will facilitate collaboration and speed up the time it takes to act on analytics reports to implement improvements.

That’s why it’s recommended to select a tool that is part of an overall product experience management (PXM) platform. PXM is an approach to product content designed to help you give consumers impactful shopping experiences across every aspect of the digital shelf.

Ecommerce analytics tools often don’t require the complex implementation processes other parts of your ecommerce tech stack might. But that doesn’t mean careful planning isn’t necessary to deploy them properly. Follow these steps to make sure your analytics tools are ready to give you actionable insights from day one.

1. Check How It Integrates With Other Solutions

To properly analyze your content, an analytics tool should be able to access your published content and the data it’s built on. That means it needs to integrate with your product content management systems. If your analytics solution is part of a broader PXM solution, this integration is built in. If not, you’ll want to investigate what the process will be for integrating your desired analytics tool with your existing solutions.

2. Define Your Analytics Use Cases

Once your analytics system is integrated, defining what use cases are most important and what you want to accomplish will help you and your teams feel aligned rather than overwhelmed. After all, ecommerce analytics can track tons of different metrics across the digital shelf. It’s important to prioritize what channels or products you want to focus on.

3. Create an Adoption Plan

An ecommerce analytics solution can only give information; it’s up to your team to integrate that information into their workflows to drive digital shelf improvements.

So, as you’re implementing the technology, it’s a good idea to plan for any change management required to help users understand the tool and how they can benefit from it. Teach future users how the analytics solution works, what its strengths are, and how they can best integrate it into their day-to-day work.

4. Implement the Analytics Platform

The actual implementation process will vary greatly depending on what solution you choose and how well it works with your other systems. You may be able to follow out-of-the-box instructions to get it configured quickly, or you may need to have your IT team perform a multi-day implementation project, which could include setting up integrations (if required) and mapping your products, attributes, and channels into the tool to direct what data you want to gather based on your use case.

5. Launch the Platform and Test the Benefits

Once the technical aspects are complete, it’s now time to deploy the analytics platform throughout your organization. In the weeks immediately following deployment, take note of its performance and how well users adapt to it to determine if any tweaks are needed to your processes or the tool itself.

Without analytics, today’s ecommerce businesses cannot reach their full potential. But with it, organizations can obtain the insights they need to enhance their product pages, optimize shoppers’ digital shelf experiences, and as a result, grow their sales.