7 Steps How to Perform an Analysis of Your Ecommerce Data

Becky Holton is a journalist and a blogger. She is interested in education technologies and is always ready to support informative speaking. Follow her on Twitter. Waiting for your answer.

People can’t try, feel, and smell things before buying from an online store. A lot of their online shopping activity is based on so-called “blind” buys. Sure, they will look at the product. They will read reviews. But there’s still a feeling of hesitation when buying online.

That’s the greatest disadvantage of online stores.

But people still keep buying. Do you know why? The advantages of online shopping outweigh the disadvantages. The greatest advantage of all is the personalized experience that the buyers get. They are being targeted with online marketing for products and services that they know they need.

Online stores achieve that through ecommerce data analytics. They get data from their target audience so they can boost the store’s appeal in the customer’s eyes. How exactly can you reach such a goal for your e-commerce business?

We’ll suggest 7 steps for you to follow. And don’t forget to perform the analysis of online retail sales statistics.

1. Set Some Goals

When you start gathering data, it will come from all over the place. When big data gets too big and you approach it without a plan, it can go very wrong. To prevent confusion from happening, you need to set some goals. Why are you going to collect data and what kind of data are you going to analyze?

Ivy Stone, part of the marketing team at BestEssay.com, shares this experience: “We wanted to reduce the training costs in our company, so we had an idea to develop a writer-to-writer tutoring system. That’s what we focused the data analytics process on. We analyzed the way our writers used the platforms, we identified the weaknesses, and we were able to develop a system that truly works.”

So set your goals. Are you analyzing data for the sake of driving sales, ecommerce sales trends, reducing costs, boosting productivity, or anything else?

2. Harness the Right Data

If you still haven’t started using Google Analytics Ecommerce Tracking, it’s time to do that. It helps you make a connection between sales data and website usage data and organize ecommerce data management. You’ll understand what bounce rates and sessions mean for your sales.

This tool already gives you the data you need. You only need to harness the right type of data and apply it in your decision-making processes.

If, for example, the team of a website like AssignmentGeek wants to improve their link-building strategy, they will analyze the traffic sources. They will get a ton of data that will identify the link-building strategies that delivered the best results. If they analyze the demographics of their audience, they won’t get relevant guidelines. They would only waste time. So it’s important for this team to focus on the exact type of data they need for the goal that they set.

3. Use the Reports to Deliver a Personalized Experience

Remember: it’s the personalized experience that drives people towards e-commerce websites. It’s what they want, and it’s what data analytics helps you deliver.

Based on someone’s purchase history on your website, you can offer specific products that they would like.

Richard Lowell, part of the marketing team at EduGeeks Club, explains how they do that: “Our analytics enable us to look into individual customer reports. We can tell how often they buy papers, and when the need for an easy essay service arises. If we know that this user buys research papers before the end of each term, we’ll drop them a special discount in their inbox at the right time. This strategy is driving a lot of sales for us.”

4. Evaluate Common Purchasing Habits

Sometimes you need to look at the general data. You’ll figure out when your general audience likes to buy, and what typically drives their buying decisions. If, for example, you notice that the majority of your website visitors like to watch product videos before closing the deal, you’ll focus on video marketing in future.

Ecommerce data helps you figure out the general tendencies of your target audience. When you get to that point, it will be easier for you to make the right business decisions.

5. Analyze Data in the Most Accurate Way Possible

Data cannot be wrong. You’re looking at facts. But although facts can’t be wrong, they can be highly misleading. When you look at them at portions, without understanding how other factors influence the process, you’ll misinterpret them.

It’s important to look at data in the context of the big picture. This is the point where beginners get confused and real data scientists excel. If you’re getting a lot of data and you find it hard to analyze it, you should consider the possibility of hiring a data scientist.

6. Visualize

Data visualization helps you interpret facts. It also helps you deliver reports in a way that’s easy to understand. But be careful; you can’t just deliver pie charts and numbers. A visual presentation of data usually requires additional descriptions. Consider utilizing presentation templates to enhance the overall impact of your data representations.

7. Data Helps You Solve Customer Issues. Focus on That!

When e-commerce business owners analyze data, they tend to focus on key performance indicators. Of course, you’ll consider them, but you should go beyond those raw numbers. Focus on the issues they indicate.

Data is your instrument to uncover technical issues that your users face at the website. If they bounce off after trying to get a response from the customer support, it means the live chat doesn’t work well.

To get better insights, you can collect more data through surveys. Alicia Moore, marketer from AustralianWritings, explains how they do that: “Systematic surveys are an important part of our marketing strategy. Whenever someone gets a product from our website, we send a brief survey asking about the experience. We regularly collect and analyze this data so we can work on improving the customer experience at our site.”

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Big data is confusing. It takes a lot of learning and practice for you to understand predictive analytics in ecommerce. When you get into the insights, however, you’ll be able to improve your e-commerce brand. That’s what it’s all about.

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