The Value of Advanced Analytics for Enterprise eCommerce

Learning to Speak Your Customers’ Language

Web analytics is one of the most important tools in any website admin’s toolbox, let alone the toolbox of someone hoping to lead their online business to success.  On a basic level, analytics help you understand how many people are coming to your site, where they are coming from, and where they often go afterward, but more advanced analytics techniques can help you learn considerably more about your customers.  In turn, understanding your customers’ behaviors on your site leads to better understanding of your customers as a whole.  When you understand your customers well, the doors of opportunity are opened for your business.

In this 1Digital blog, we will focus on the benefits that the application of advanced analytics techniques can bring to your business.  In the aptly-named Information Age, the competition is high to invent and master new ways of learning customers’ personalities ethically, efficiently, and effectively.  In the days of brick-and-mortar, the key was building customer rapport during the first visit and subsequently maintaining that in-person relationship.  Customer service agents and salespeople would often build individual relationships with returning customers which is much more difficult when many customers are simply shopping through their phones.  Analtyics, however, allow you to build rapport in the age of eCommerce.

Advanced Analytics Techniques Reveal Brand Breakdowns

One of the greatest benefits of adopting advanced analytics techniques is that it allows you to see where your brand can improve.  One of the greatest challenges that successful, established brands encounter is how to adapt to changing trends, customer preferences, and even generational differences.  Company longevity depends on the ability to evolve over time.

A great example of the challenge of brand evolution – and arguably even brand breakdowns – can be found in the rapid rebranding that Pepsi has undergone over the years.  Pepsi’s logo has evolved so rapidly that many people can’t even remember what the current logo variation is.  While it is still identifiable, the logo’s many variations have led to a visual confusion for many customers.  Going back from any of their changes, though, wasn’t a realistic option.  The logo needed an update, but Pepsi just didn’t have the information necessary to nail the launch of the new logo.

For eCommerce brands, the challenge of brand longevity can be greatly reduced by properly implementing intelligent analytics techniques.  A/B testing, for example, combined with careful analysis of trends within each group could quickly reveal how your consumer base at large is likely to react to a change in your branding.  For such analysis, however, you would need to have good analytics tools and techniques under your belt.

Improve Your Site by Reading Digital Tells

In face-to-face, over-the-phone, and even video-based sales, a salesperson can become very successful by honing their ability to read how their clients respond to their pitches.  For the majority of eCommerce customers, especially for larger companies, no such option exists.  The only trace that customers leave online is in the digital data they offer when they visit, interact with links and products on your site, and leave.  With the right tools, the seemingly insignificant footprints of online customers can instead become guideposts that allow you to hone the experience of shopping on your website.

Using advanced analytics techniques, you can collect data such as the amount of time customers spend on each page, the number of times they double back to specific pages, and even, with a careful reading of your analytics results, where on your site customers may be becoming frustrated with your web design or functionality.  While some customers are going to be willing to take the time to provide feedback in the way of surveys or emails, most customers who become frustrated with your site are likely to simply leave and go to a competitor, of which there are plenty at the moment.  Your brand is unique and there are reasons for customers to choose you over the competition, but, for many customers, shopping experience issues are a dealbreaker.

Increase Your Return on Investment for Specials, Sales, and More

One of the most painful experiences eCommerce brands can experience is an underperforming sale.  Even established brands have often felt the sting that results from investing heavily in a sale that is expected to bring customers in the door and having it fall flat.  Utilizing deeper analytics can help not only avoid dud sales but also reduce the losses from sales that don’t fly as high as planned.  If you’re measuring customer behavior effectively, even a sale that doesn’t perform as well as others can prove to be valuable.  For example, a storewide sale that performed poorly could reveal that your customers spent so much time browsing through their options that they never made a purchase due to indecision.  The products that received the most attention could become the focus of future sales, meaning that the “failed” sale didn’t lose nearly as much as it could have due to it yielding valuable data.

Deeper analytics practices can be applied to email campaigns as well.  By analyzing, customizing, and adapting your email campaigns based on detailed viewing and interaction data, you can ensure that the money you’re investing into the creation and maintenance of email campaigns is bringing you the ROI you want and need.

The future of businesses online is built on the collection and application of useful data.  It’s important, however, to remember that you need to collect data in such a way that it maintains customer trust.  Your business has an incentive to hone the data they collect as well; collecting only relevant information costs less and yields usable results.

If you’re looking to take your application of web analytics to the next level, we can help.  Here at 1Digital Agency, we’ve devoted our careers to understanding eCommerce better than anyone in the industry.  We want to use what we know to help businesses like yours succeed.  Contact us today at info@1digitalagency.com to see how we can improve your ROI through the use of advanced analytics techniques.