Ivan Silva
For those of you that are looking for new ways to leverage analytics for a positive boost to your eCommerce site conversions. Here are a few tips that highlight the standards that should be considered when auditing your Analytics game that can save you time. You will also learn how to beyond Google Analytics that can save you even more time and help you realize new opportunities on your site.
Events, page views, events, and user timings, are just a few metrics to evaluate within Google Analytics. With the new GA4 there are a few newer reports and features, remember to open a separate property for your new GA4 tools, this will allow you to compare the reports to use the ones that best suit your needs.
As your team grows so does the need for the optimization of your software, in the GA case. The cost is sometimes prohibitive but can arm your team with a wider view to capitalize on opportunities. But if you need more than 10M hits and the cost is not resonating with your leadership team it may be time to explore a different solution.
Most retailers rely on Google Analytics or the publisher reports e.g., Google Ads, FB Ads, or platforms like AdRoll, etc. for understanding how well their ad spend is working.
Publisher reports are highly biased and give you a narrow view of the performance within a channel, Google Analytics also doesn't provide you the true picture or actionable insights and gives you aggregated data.
Moreover, with third-party cookies going away and data privacy taking center stage, these platforms will continue to provide narrower insights causing retailers to waste ad spend on channels and audiences that don't convert.
Additionally, over 95% of a retailer's visitors are anonymous and such platforms don't help in understanding such consumers.
Finding a solution provider to take control of your data is no easy task. Thankfully, our team has surrounded itself with a roster of trusted partners that can help retailers adjust their advertising channel mix to spend money where they get the best return. LayerFive is a third-party analytics tool that is separate from the platform where you are using ad spend. Their philosophy is that this shows the real return on your ad spend, which is potentially different from what publisher tools show. This helps retailers understand if they are wasting their ad dollars on a channel that is not converting if the ad channel reports are showing inflated performance.
When considering an Analytics Partner or Platform you should also consider their capability to connect to e-commerce platforms e.g. Shopify and other operational and marketing platforms like Klaviyo, Yotpo, Loyalty Lion, and Gorgias for example. Having a 360-degree view of your consumers' behavior will give you a clear direction on business decisions ranging from product investment, like which products to buy more of or less of, marketing investment decisions like sending out SMS versus emails to a certain customer type.
Read about how they helped Billy Footwear - Case Study.