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Top 6 eCommerce Analytics Tools For Online Stores
September 3, 2019
8 min
eCommerce analytics tools are continuously developing with the online market, which has tripled over the last three years, according to The Global Ecommerce Playbook.
According to the statistics, only 20% of eCommerce owners actually know how to use their analytics data for increasing performance, and track these constantly. The majority of retailers don’t even check their key website indicators such as conversion rate, traffic sources, shopping behaviour, and goals.
When creating this article, we tried to calculate the total number of eCommerce analytics tools which could help entrepreneurs and marketing managers gather insights, crucial for their marketing strategy development and business scaling. We stopped at 50, being sure we would need days to complete this list.
In this post, we will review the most popular and effective eСommerce analytics software, which we highly recommend considering.
Web analytics tools provide chief eCommerce managers with relevant insights on the performance of their website and ad campaigns. This data forms the basis for a marketing strategy and crucial business decisions.
Most web analytics tools perform within the OLAP framework. This is the acronym for online analytical processing, which means the procedure of gathering and analysing data from multiple database systems simultaneously. Thus, one service can display statistics from your AdWords, email and social media marketing and other accounts.
The main advantage of all business analytical tools is the ability to collect data faster and more efficiently than you can do manually. Most software includes dashboards which visualise your key performance indicators, metrics and other data in diagrams, charts and tables. This makes it easy to track the changes in your business performance over a period.
Entirely, web analytics services track:
Some tools combine these metrics, and others focus on one type.
The most classic analytics tool is used by almost 80% of all websites worldwide. But along with that, 80% of these users are failing to make the most of it.
Google Analytics gained its popularity within eCommerce owners, thanks to the ease of use and free access. Moreover, the corporation offers free comprehensive guides on how to add tracking codes, configure reports, segment audience or set up goals. More in-depth information you can gain at Google Analytics Academy. The interface is clear and user-friendly, however, the more knowledge you have of Google analytics, the more useful and unobvious insights you can receive about your traffic and audience.
Pros: Free access (Standard); Has almost every metric you need; Collecting data from multiple platforms; Perfect for small businesses; Multi-channel reporting; Cross Device reporting; Custom goals and funnels, event tracking, etc.; Easy integration with AdWords, AdSense, Search Console and DoubleClick AdExchange
Cons: Deep knowledge required; 10M hit limit per month; Data refresh only once per 24 hrs; Only 20 metrics and dimensions per user; Complicated setup; Incorrect tracking when website traffic is high (need to upgrade to Google Analytics 360)
Google Analytics 360 is a more professional software with extra comprehensive audit functions. This guarantees you highly accurate (99.9%) data which refresh every 4 hours or less. The premium package includes 50 custom variables and 200 dimensions, allows Data Driven Attribution modelling and better determines online customer behaviour. But…. it will cost you from $150,000 per year.
Ecommerce tracking in Google Analytics gives an opportunity to measure your retail performance. Among these metrics are:
Google analytics easily integrates with almost all eCommerce platforms such as — Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, 3dcart and more.
Another feature we like is the in-service search. Thus, you can just ask Google Analytics a question like ‘The total number of transactions in May 2018’ and receive an instant answer:
However, in addition to the pros, there are some cons.
First of all, you need to keep your Google Analytics account in order, especially if you use its data for your marketing decisions. Incorrectly added tracking codes or other mistakes can angle final reports. If you are a self-taught amateur, you may not find where these errors are, and blindly rely on inaccurate indicators which could vary from your CRM data.
We would like to recommend you keep your Google Analytics account updated, but simultaneously, use other tools.
Using Google Analytics for eCommerce is an almost perfect solution for small and medium online stores and services, at least if you run Google ad campaigns and target to rank higher in the Google search results.
Adobe Marketing Cloud is a customer-focused tool that combines analytics, CRM and 3rd party data in the single view of a consumer. The developers say that they aimed to create a platform which will help businesses collect the data for BOGO offers and whitepapers.
The promise of Adobe is to deliver the right experience to the right person at the right time. And this is what most users appreciate. With the AMC analytics tool, you can track real-time and targeted campaigns, and measure the performance of your email marketing. Another benefit is the option of audience segmentation by persona. This data is factually used for ad campaign automation.
Besides the social, mobile and email marketing solutions, there is a range of other AMC advantages. The programming support has the capability of app-centric interface and cloud data storage for more comfortable work. All necessary information is saved in a separate folder.
Pros: Alerts to anomalies in the data; Flexible Audience Segmentation; Measurement of mobile apps performance; Mobile support; Strong asset management capability; Tracking cross-channel advertising; Attractive interface.
Cons: Costly for small businesses; Inability to use some of the data points on the same report; Deep knowledge required; Inflexible customisation.
Adobe Analytics doesn’t offer a free trial and works on a subscription basis. The final annual price depends on the number of hits a website receives and fluctuates from $30,000 to $100,000 per year.
The concept of KISSmetrics software allows monitoring and accumulating information on visitor behaviour.
The Person Profile must be the main benefit of this eCommerce analytics tool. The system collects all traits of each user: ad campaign sources they came from (with history), all activities on your website, events they have triggered (with a timeline), and history of their property. This data is essential for improving both customer experience and your digital marketing performance.
The following functions of the eCommerce analytics tool are helpful for building marketing strategies, following trends and tracking changes:
Additionally, KISSmetrics has free setup guidance and email support. The conversion periods are unlimited that is optimal in the act of analytical research. You can also try the debugger feature paired with other tracking options.
Pros: Powerful visualisation options; Person Profiles; Timeline of events a user did; Automated campaigns; Personalised pop-ups; Extensive data and insights.
Cons: User-unfriendly interface; Difficult to install; High learning curve; Limited integration capabilities.
KISSmetrics has a 14-day free trial. The pricing plans start from $500 per month for the Growth plan, the Power plan will cost you $850.
Most eCommerce owners prefer this analytics tool because of the variety of available integrations: from Magento and Shopify to Chargify and MailChimp.
The key feature of the Crazy Egg eCommerce analytics tool is a heatmap which allows tracking areas on a website your visitors hover, and areas which remain blind, as well as how users are scrolling down and where exactly they click. This is a perfect tool for digital marketing specialists to audit website UX and to identify the sections which ‘kill’ conversions.
The interface of this analytical tool is user-friendly. Besides the behavioural market feature, there is a wide range of other features:
Pros: Heat mapping; Easy implementation; Clear visual reporting; Good UX and UI; Low cost.
Cons: Poor funnel analysis, Gathering statistical significance takes 30+ days; Slow data exports; Lack of cross-domain tracking.
You might be interested: How to analyse the shopping behaviour on your website: 5 easy steps
The Crazy Egg eCommerce analytics tool offers a 30-day free trial and has 4 packages. All these have unlimited A/B test and edits:
The Basic package, which is limited by 100 recordings, three months of recording storage and 3 websites, will cost you $24 per month.
The Standard plan with 500 recordings and 1 year of recording storage, will cost you $49 every month.
The Plus package has twice as more recording and storage period as the Standard (1,000 and 2 years) costs $99 per month.
The most expensive is the Pro plan, which is suitable for analytics agencies to a far greater degree. It’s limited by 5,000 recordings and 2 years of recording storage and offer priority support. This price is $249 per month.
Hotjar provides eCommerce owners and marketing managers with all the opportunities for deep website analysis paired with the feedback tools. It allows tracking visitors activities on your website via heatmaps, sessions recording in video format, conversion funnel and behaviour logic as well as traffic reports.
But the more interesting feature is the ability to track a user’s voice. Hotjar offers a widget for incoming feedback which you can place on any page on your website. Thus, visitors can rate your service and add a message in just two clicks. Like stars, there are emoticons from totally satisfied to totally unsatisfied in a different design. Finally, you will be able to track the dynamics of the customer experience and quickly notice and fix bugs.
Along with that, Hotjar provides other widgets for NPS and polls with yes or no answers.
Pros: Heat mapping; Video session recording; Poll function; Excellent UI; Convenient filtering; Division into mobile, desktop and tablet versions.
Cons: Inability to exclude URLs; A separate site dashboard; Tracking codes slow down page speed; Poorly organised data
The Hotjar eCommerce analytics tool doesn’t have a free trial and offers 4 plans depending on the number of page views per day. The cheapest one, which collects data from up to 20,000 page views per day, will cost you $89 per month. The most expensive plan, limited by 400,000 per day costs $589 per month.
Custora customer-centric software has the business intelligence concept and the service range is continuously improving. Besides the predictive analysis features and options there are various other helpful benefits:
The Custora tool is widely used for retention marketing and PPC campaign targeting. You can set up automated triggered campaigns based on last consumer purchase patterns. Thanks to the churn detection feature you can track the behaviour of each customer and receive notifications when their habits change.
The analytics tool is also widely used for improving lookalike audiences for PPC campaigns.
Pros: Lifecycle segmentation; Email marketing integration; eCommerce focus; Great reporting and analytics dashboards; Ease of use.
Cons: Very expensive; Mostly for large businesses; The limited number of personas.
Custora doesn’t offer a free trial and works on a subscription basis. This is the most expensive tool within our list. The price depends on the number of customers. Thus, you will need to pay from $3,000 per month if you have up to 1M customers monthly, and $6,000 if you have 1-2M.
As you can see, each of these tools has similar features and follow similar goals but have entirely different focuses. When preparing this post, we inspected numerous reviews on each software, and almost in every comment, eCommerce owners described great results. Just three months after subscription or acquisition, they managed to increase their traffic and sales, improve customer experience with A/B testing and which impressed us the most, these analytics services became ‘common sources of truth for questions related to user activity on their websites’.
eCommerce business is not only complex but most importantly, curious and exciting science which you must dive deep into to gain excellent results.
If you have any questions about what eCommerce analytics tool to choose for your website, please feel free to contact our experienced marketing specialists.
CMO at Promodo
With over nine years in the realm of content creation and marketing, I've honed my expertise in both B2C and B2B landscapes. You may have come across my insights in renowned blogs like Smart Insights, SemRush, Clutch.co, Forbes, and various others. I hold a steadfast belief that businesses thrive when they simply communicate complex processes, underscoring the advantages and genuine value they offer to their clients.
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