Love working with data, graphs, and analytics, don’t you? Then read on…
The heart of a business is the fine-tuned data. For understanding the nuances of your business and the route it is taking, you need to be hands on about the eCommerce metrics. From optimizing sales messages to maintaining quality traffic, understanding your site’s performance lies in the statistics. Analytics tools play an important role in unearthing that information for you. They gather all the relevant data, do the number crunching, put it all in a simple format that you can comprehend, and also give you suggestions on where to concentrate on getting the dollars flowing (the cherry on the cake, ain’t it?).
We recommend analytical software as one of the first tools any website owner should install. You need to invest some time in choosing the right tool to get your business soaring. Plenty would match your budget and industry. To make your task a little less arduous, we have compiled a list of the best of the best analytics tools available in the market:
1. Google Analytics:
This one is the king of all web analytics tools. It is super popular, is absolutely free and is used by website owners across the globe. Yes, you heard that right! The tool integrates seamlessly with multiple favored platforms and helps to analyze your eCommerce conversion rates. Google’s Enhanced eCommerce reports present you with data beyond the base-level.
The software can help you chart:
- Unique sales performance of your products
- Source of traffic
- The conversion ratio of customers
- Favorite customer pages
- Customer Bounce rates
- Paid campaigns
The only downside is that you need to customize different tools to get the report fine-tuned. But owing to its immense popularity, there are enough YouTube tutorials available that will quickly get you through the process. Or you can refer to Google Analytics Support
2. KISSmetrics:
This is a tool that not only helps in deciding your website layout by triggering pop-ups, lightboxes, and notifications, but it also lends a helping hand in marketing with its granular analytics capabilities. The comprehensive data provided by the tool helps you in retentions and fresh customer influx. The software updates you with an advanced report that drills down to single user behaviors and helps you discern which of your campaigns are working. The only downside is that it doesn’t come free. If you have the budget, we would suggest you go ahead with this extremely advanced platform.
3. Matomo:
Matomo (formerly Piwik) is a free tool just like Google Analytics. It is an open-source software with a signature eCommerce analytics feature giving the clients automated reports in metrics and sales reports sorted product, geolocation, and channel-wise. The tool integrates easily with popular CMS such as Magento, WooCommerce, and Shopify.
4. Crazy Egg:
This software is unique owing to the fact that it provides you with heat maps. These maps point out the problem areas and popular fields of your site for you to specifically work on improving the weak links. Users can also make use of A/B testing feature included in this tool. It is not just eCommerce specific but could be used on literally any kind of websites.
5. Hotjar:
Hotjar also dishes out heat mapping and real-time recording, providing its users with fine-tuned usability and improved click-through and conversion rates. Hotjar lets you get a perspective of how your clients view your website, giving you a visual and data representation of your metrics. The tool presents the clients with an insight of visitor clicks on CTAs, attention-grabbing campaigns and weak points in the customer funnel.
6. Woopra:
At about 70%, order abandonment remains the biggest vice that plagues the eCommerce industry. Woopra is one platform that has been developed specifically to help you regain abandoned cart orders. Woopra’s ‘checkout success specific’ analytics lets you study the eCommerce funnel in-depth and fix the problem points. The tool also creates individual profiles for you to understand shopping trends and best customers. In other words, the software helps you figure out what exactly you need to do to make your customers spend money on your site.
7. Klaviyo:
Kalviyo is an email automation and analytics platform that caters explicitly to eCommerce marketing. Be it bringing in quality leads or customer loyalty, e-mail automation is the key that opens all your doors to success. The tool performs automatic audience segmentation and advanced reporting of metrics specific to e-mail analytics, also helping you with the tracking of financial ROI of your website.
8. Visual Web Optimizer (VWO):
VWO is a solution based on A/B testing. It helps you enhance the visual image of your website. It lets you personalize your website based on client backgrounds. It also allows you to create multiple iterations of your site to see which page gets the maximum clicks and conversions. VWO works on Amazon’s principle of personalization and would, therefore, help you boost your sales in more ways that one.
9. Photoslurp:
Photoslurp focuses on getting info on UGC (User Generated Content) to boost your sales. It helps you zero in on the most liked products, best customer photos and the most loyal customers of your brand. The platform tracks the engagement, ROI and conversions based on your photos. You can use this information to push popular photos in your ad campaigns to engage and convert customers.
10. RetentionGrid:
This analytics software presents you with easy to understand data with color-coded graphs. It also provides you with insights on marketing campaigns targeted at different segments of site visitors.
11. Metrilo
An actionable analytics platform, Metrilo provides its users’ analytics, integrated CRM as well as automated e-mail marketing options. It also comes with Retention analysis. The tool helps you analyze the data, act upon it right away, understand customer lifecycle, send out marketing materials and create loyal customers, all in one go! It gets even better. Metrilo integrates with platforms like WooCommerce, Magento, and Shopify and syncs historical data, so that you can even access past data and study them.
12. Clicky:
The software is one of the easiest to use of all analytical tools. It also provides its customers with real-time information update, which is a unique feature.
13. Adobe Experience Cloud:
Adobe Experience Cloud (formerly Adobe Marketing Cloud) is for the biggies. The tool is apt for large-scale eCommerce site data analysis. The downside is that it is pretty expensive and complicated to use.
14. GoStats:
The software gives you a true play-by-play list of all the things your site visitors do while on your website. GoStats provides you with just the data relevant to your website performance, instead of confusing you with too much information. It keeps you updated on the day-to-day activities in a manner pleasing to your eyes and mind. It gives you all the information you would need about your visitors, and is remarkably easy to use.
15. MozBar:
MozBar, free extension from Google Chrome is a tool that concentrates on SEO, Google ranking and page crawlability to proffer you data that helps your site become high ranking in Google searches. It enables you to identify and eliminate 404 error that might be hindering your progress in search results. It can also be used for optimizing link building strategies.
16. ClearBit:
Clearbit’s Salesforce integration helps you track lead generation, retargeting and conversion. It gives you a fair idea of how leads seep through your eCommerce funnel.
17. Taplytics:
Taplytics work on faster page iterations and A/B testing. The tool helps you gather more information on how your customer interprets your website.
Any business is nothing without the understanding of where you are and where you are going. And all the answers lie with your metrics. Your job here is to identify a tool that best suits your requirement. The entire process should depend on the type of industry you represent and the products that you showcase. Your best bet is to finalize a tool that:
- Is in sync with your marketing strategies and campaigns
- Identifies your weak areas and analyzes the data for insights
- Easy to use with seamless platform integration
- Comprehensive in data and reports shared
- Gives you concise information avoiding junk data
Hope the above list has been helpful in guiding you to the perfect analytics tool. Let us know if we have been helpful. If you have any more questions, feel free to Contact Us or call our eCommerce experts at (888) 478-4799
