For any ecommerce business, monitoring your website’s marketing analytics is essential to help grow and improve your operations. Marketing metrics and analytics help reveal the success of various marketing campaigns and guide your business to help ensure your efforts are working effectively and efficiently.

Marketing analytics encompasses the tools and processes marketers use to quantify and evaluate their digital marketing performance. There are many ways to utilize marketing analytics to help measure the success of your efforts. For instance, connecting your site to tools such as Google Analytics will help you track web analytics for your website, including:

• Session traffic
• Bounce rate
• Sessions by country
• Pageviews
• Sessions by device
• Average session duration

Content Marketers and Search Engine Optimisation Specialists analyse web analytics to guide their marketing initiatives and improve site performance. For instance, if a digital marketer notices a page has a high bounce rate and limited session traffic, they can rewrite the page to incorporate more relevant search topics for their users and include new media on the page to improve the performance.

For social media marketers, Facebook Business Manager generates reports that display the results of various campaigns. Marketers can run multiple campaigns simultaneously and evaluate the link clicks, Cost-Per-Click (CPC), location, and other metrics to help guide their efforts. They can pause weak-performing ads and modify the ad copy to appeal to the most engaged target audience. Most importantly, they can quantify the return on their ad spend, one of the top ecommerce KPIs to track.

What is Data Analytics in Marketing?

Data analytics is essential to help marketers understand how their customers interact with their ecommerce storefront and advertising efforts. By analysing data around marketing campaigns, businesses can better predict customer behaviour and improve the ROI of their marketing efforts by promoting campaigns that resonate with their target audience. Also, data analytics can help businesses define their target audience. They can examine their most profitable customer segments based on their interests, age, gender, and more.

What is B2B Marketing Analytics?

B2B means business to business, and it is pretty different from business-to-consumer marketing. B2B marketing cycles are often longer and more complex and pivot in and out of a marketing sales funnel.

B2B ecommerce is a fast-growing industry, and sales are expected to outgrow B2B ecommerce sales, so marketers must leverage a dynamic marketing strategy to reach and appeal to their audience. B2B marketers must utilize paid campaigns, social media ads, pay-per-click ads, search engine optimisation, content marketing, and hyper-personalised email marketing to frequently nurture their relationships with potential clients.

59% of B2B marketers cited SEO as the most significant impact on their lead generation goals, and 81 % of businesses reported blogging as critical to their B2B lead generation. Marketers must provide value upfront and qualify their audience’s pain points while demonstrating how their company offers solutions to their problems.

They should critically access their marketing analytics to understand how their audience interacts with their marketing collateral and continuously revise and reassess their efforts to create a more efficient and effective sales cycle.

Why Are Web Analytics Important to Marketers

Web analytics are important to marketers for many reasons:

• Understand your visitors’ engagement with your website and marketing efforts. Connecting your website to Google Analytics and Google Search Console on your website will allow you to use your most successful marketing channels, what search terms visitors use to find your site, how they interact with your content, devices they use, and more. Using web analytics, marketers can revise their content and campaigns to perform more effectively and increase conversion rates.
  
  
• Break down how well your content performs using metrics, such as bounce rate, average session duration, and keyword rankings. Web analytics are imperative to guide how marketers should revise call-to-action (CTA) buttons, purchase links, and keyword topics to improve site performance and conversions.
  
• Improve your search engine visibility. Create monthly reports to document your organic traffic, goal completions, top-performing content, and other metrics to quantify how well your site pages perform. Use information from SEO tools, such as Google Search Console, to assess clicks, impressions, click-through rate, and average position of the keyword generating traffic to your site.
  
  
• Assess referral traffic to see which sites bring new visitors to your website. Marketers can reach out to top referring sites and collaborate to improve referral traffic and gain valuable partnerships. Mutual recommendations and cross-promotions are excellent strategies to increase inbound traffic.
  
  
• Track ecommerce KPIs, such as ROI, conversion rates, and transaction history to quantify the success of your storefront and marketing efforts.
  
  

What is Marketing Analytics Software Used For?

Businesses use marketing analytics software to centralise their operations and simplify their marketing efforts from an integrated platform. There are many different kinds of marketing analytics software businesses can leverage. Whether it is for email marketing, content management, or customer relationship management, premium marketing analytics software is essential to manage and assess advertising efforts from one platform.

Many marketing analytics software tools allow businesses to integrate various tools and platforms into one centralised location. Premium software can help automate processes and leverage more informative data to guide marketing efforts and save time on internal operations.

How to Use Analytics in Marketing to Guide Your Ecommerce Strategy

There are many ways to use analytics to guide your marketing strategy. For an ecommerce business, it’s crucial to invest in a comprehensive marketing strategy to reach your target audience.

Some of your customers may be more responsive to email marketing promotions, while others may want to read about your products and explore content on your ecommerce storefront. By employing a varied marketing strategy, you can test and compare which segments work best for your business and devote more resources to leverage your most effective campaigns.

Let’s discuss how to use analytics to guide your marketing strategy through the most common and effective types of digital marketing.

1. Content Marketing

Content marketing is one of the most effective advertising strategies to help gain more exposure for your storefront, qualify leads, and build rapport with your audience. Many online shoppers may purchase items from unfamiliar brands based on high-rated customer reviews and attractive images and videos. However, thorough product descriptions and brand messaging are essential to connect with the reader emotionally and logically. (Check out our guides on retail pricing strategies and ecommerce product listing strategies to further improve your online listings!)

Content is essential for businesses to implement on their website to convince and convert potential visitors successfully. 95 % of B2B service and product buyers say that content helped them trust a business more, and 71 % admitted they review an organisation’s blog during the buyer’s journey.

Tools like Google Analytics are essential data analytic tools to guide your content marketing efforts. Connect your website to Google Analytics, and it will track web analytics for your content marketing efforts. You will be able to access the top landing pages on your site and analyse how they perform based on user and session traffic, bounce rate, pages/session, average session duration, page views, entrances, and goal completions.

These analytic segments will help you understand which content is working and how to optimise current content to perform better. By continuously improving your existing content and publishing fresh content on your site that aligns with your audience’s queries, you can steadily increase traffic to your site and conversions.

2. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

SEO is critical to the success of your ecommerce business. If you do not optimize your product pages and content to align with the most valuable search queries that align with your business, you will lose market share to your competitors.

SEO can be intimidating, but the most fundamental strategies and analytics to oversee your business include keyword rankings, traffic acquisition channels, backlinks, and traffic by region. Using SEO tools, such as SemRush or AhRefs, marketers can oversee keyword rankings, traffic costs, and backlinks driving referral traffic.

For instance, you can enter the root domain for your website to view keyword rankings, backlinks, and traffic costs quantified by the value of their keyword positions. Using this information, you can revise product pages and site content to incorporate keyword opportunities to increase traffic to the site. Additionally, you can research competitor sites to guide future content efforts and identify gaps in keyword rankings.

You can also analyse the backlink profile of any given site to access strong backlinks that influence the site’s domain authority and remove toxic backlinks that penalize the site. More than 66% of pages have no backlinks, and the more backlinks on a page, the more organic traffic is generated from Google.

Google Search Console is also an instrumental marketing analytics tool. Businesses can connect their site to GSC and track the performance of their site. You can inspect the keywords that generate clicks and impressions in Google search engines, as well as the average position and click-through rate for each term. Additionally, marketers can also oversee their site’s mobile usability, coverage, and core web vitals.

3. Google Ads and Pay-Per-Click Marketing

SEO and content marketing are both long-term marketing efforts, so it takes considerable time, effort, and resources to generate results. The benefit is once you have great content on-site and an effective SEO strategy that produces consistent monthly organic traffic, you won’t have to pay for inbound traffic from qualified visitors.

On the other hand, pay-per-click campaigns can help propel your site to the top of search for the keywords you want to eventually rank for in search. However, each click generated from a PPC campaign will cost your organisation depending on the value of that specific keyword. Since you want to get the most out of your marketing dollars, carefully accessing your PPC campaign’s marketing analytics is essential.

The most important analytics to guide your PPC campaign include:

• Clicks and Click-Through Rate (CTR): Most PPC campaigns start with a wide selection of keywords. It’s best to run your campaign for a couple of weeks with a test budget and then pause keywords that have low CTR. 
  
  
• Cost Per Click (CPC): CPC quantifies the cost of each click per keyword term. Ideally, you want your CPC to be as low as possible. The number of impressions or number of times your ad appears in search versus how many times they clicked on the ad will determine the effectiveness of each keyword term.
  
  
• Conversion Rate (CVR): Although conversion rate is not indicative of your PPC campaigns’ success, it is a valuable metric to determine if your landing pages effectively convert customers. PPC is at the top of your marketing funnel, while conversions are at the bottom. Although your campaigns may generate high CTR, the conversion rate quantifies the number of conversions received by the total clicks.
  
  
• Cost Per Acquisition (CPA): CPA is the price marketers pay for every new customer they gain. You can calculate it by dividing the total cost of conversions by the number of conversions. Depending on each conversion’s value, CPA will help you quantify which keywords result in the most conversions at the best price.
  
  

4. Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is similar to PPC campaigns, except your advertisement placements exist on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and other social media destinations. Instead of bidding on specific keywords, marketers create ad campaigns and target them based on specified interests, regions, and demographics. For instance, a luxury ecommerce business selling high-end purses would target affluent areas and target women with high salaries and premium fashion interests, such as Gucci or Louis Vuitton.

Marketers should test various target audiences and pause poor-performing campaigns while allocating more budget to successful ad placements based on marketing analytics, such as:

• Reach and Impressions: Reach measures how many people saw your social media ad, while impressions calculate the number of times your post was seen. Both are valuable to assess the effectiveness of each ad in your campaign. Successful ads have a high CTR based on the number of impressions.
  
  
• Cost Per Result: It is best to quantify the cost of an average conversion on your website tied to your advertisements. The cost per result will show you the average price of your ad based on your campaign’s custom metric or business goal. It is a valuable metric to determine each campaign’s performance so you can pause poor-performing ad sets.
  
  
• Ad Frequency: For an ecommerce campaign, you want to keep your ad frequency low because it will tell you the average times an individual viewed your ad. If your ad frequency is high, it indicates your ad is not producing interest for your audience to click on your landing page. Revise your targeting and ad placement to help entice new users to click and improve lacklustre ads.
  
  
• Cost Per Click (CPC) / Cost Per Impression (CPM): CPC shows you the cost of someone clicking on your ad, and CPM shows you how much you pay per 1,000 views. By continuously adjusting your campaigns based on audience engagement, you can lower both CPC and CPM, which will indicate to Facebook that your ads are relevant to increase your relevance score. Don’t let poor-performing ads run too long. Continuously test and revise your ad campaigns to keep your audience interested and happy, and you will lower your CPC by increasing your click-through rate.
  

5. AI Machine-learning Hyper-personalisation

There are a variety of distinct vendors offering hyper-personalisation software, be wary of those distinctions. Opportunity to integrate data collected through using your UTMs, directly, thereby preventing the suggestion of a silo facility. The attraction is that it also offers live impression data, not collected by respective platforms, including frequency of return, time on the product page, alternate inspection and comparisons, together with other browsing and all purchase data. Hyper-personalisation Software is a big-data facility, delivering a finite selection of imminent purchases most likely to be made by each consumer uniquely, but for the sake of offering it to them.

If you appreciate how unique and personal product selection is, that relevancy to each person is distinct, you are perfectly placed to appreciate that what is offered to each consumer must be unique and essential to them alone. Products selected to be offered by hyper-personalisation use data from watching both that individual’s buying habits but essentially what they browse, how often they return to look at them again, how long they peruse, what they spend most time reviewing etc. Data is not collected by platforms but is available with the right software installed on it.

All of which create a unique profile and contribute to their selections. To ignore this is to offer your competitors an opportunity to steal away your customers, but equally important it fails to illustrate your empathy and lack of effort, to be worthy of being their preferred retailer.

Further it not only identifies products most likely to be purchased next by each consumer (thereby, according to Statista and McKinsey – delivering 20x the return from hyper-personalised email marketing) it sends those selections to the consumer at a send time optimised opportunity. It doesn’t have to rely on the consumer returning to your site, to see their neatly arranged personal selection.