Learn how to prepare for web analytics implementations and avoid common issues.
Ecommerce success relies upon accurate data; if data is reliable, then ecommerce teams can confidently use the data to inform decision-making. Web analytics platforms measure a wide range of online activity and user behaviour. For example, tracking how many users visit, which pages they visit and what actions they take.
Businesses use web analytics platforms to measure and benchmark site performance, evaluating KPIs (key performance indicators) such as conversion rate and repeat purchase rate. However, many ecommerce analytics implementations have basic errors, resulting in data pollution or gaps in tracking that impede analysis and reporting. If your analytics setup is flawed, you could be compromising your ecommerce performance.
Invest in ecommerce analytics
The root cause of failed analytics setups is usually a lack of focus during the site planning and launch project. Often businesses fail to invest in their web analytics setup simply because they don’t understand the ROI, or the risks of not taking it seriously.
There are many ways in which your analytics data can be borked; for example, not applying filters to remove non-customer traffic from reports. A good example is internal traffic, where your business users are hitting the pages every day and those hits are tracked by the analytics tool and counted in reports. This can make your pages look more popular than they really are and suppress key metrics like conversion rate
What’s the solution?
In our experience, the optimal approach is to ensure an ecommerce analytics and data specialist is involved in your website launch from the start. If there is a clear measurement framework with a prioritised set of requirements, your analytics specialist can work with developers to ensure an appropriate data infrastructure is in place and configure analytics tools to provide the required data views.
For our 60th episode we’re joined by industry expert Alasdair Wightman, CEO of So What Analytics. Al is highly respected and has a wealth of experience aligning analytics implementations with business needs, advising Clients of all shapes and sizes to help them be more data-driven. Al shares insights on common analytics implementation issues, how to avoid them and how best to use analytics tools for ecommerce.
You can also listen to our ecommerce analytics implementation episode via the following:
Key discussion points
- What are the common issues with analytics implementations and what are the knock-on effects?
- How can ecommerce teams prepare effectively for analytics implementations?
- What are common configuration errors and how can they be fixed?
- What are the most under utilised features of Google Analytics for ecommerce?
- How important is a well set up tag management system like GTM?
- What are the risks with tag management solutions?
- What’s the go live process for validating an analytics set-up and monitoring it in the live production environment?
