Thanks to modern web analytics tools you can obtain valuable information about what is happening on your website, what information or products the customer is interested in and where they came from. You get the chance to offer them goods they showed interest in but did not complete the order for, and other valuable business information. Much of the information that only the shop assistant has at the moment of sale in a physical shop can reach you from your e-shop! Let's show the specific benefits of web analytics with an example.
Let's start with a short comparison of a customer's visit to a physical shop and to an online shop. They have a lot in common.
Physical Shop
How Does the Customer Find Your Shop?
One of the key parameters of a physical shop is its location. For a customer to come and look at a physical shop, they must pass by it. Or, if they are looking for a certain kind of goods, they can learn its location by searching for shops with those goods in the area. It is good to make this information easily available to the customer on maps, in business registers and in a well-placed description on the website – in the contact details and on social networks.
The Customer's Visit to the Shop
A customer has come to your physical shop, looks at the displayed goods, looks for the product they are after and, if they cannot find it themselves, asks the shop assistant. The assistant is immediately able to tell them whether they have the goods, where to find them and the price, or to offer related similar goods if the requested product is not currently available. Here the customer evaluates availability, how clear and cosy the shop is, how pleasant and willing the staff are to help, and also the price the shop offers.
An offer of a cheaper loyalty price (a loyalty bonus programme or customer cards) can help the seller here to get information about the customer and monitor their interest in products and further purchases, for example by scanning the barcode into the till system. Another bonus can be handing over a link to the e-shop on the physical loyalty card with a discount on the first order. This way they easily find out where to find you in the online world.
Online Platform
How Does Your Customer Get to Your Website and How Do They Find You?
To find this out you need to set up measurement on your website. By creating a data layer together with setting up Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager technologies it is possible to track where the customer comes from.
Usually it will be:
- from advertising campaigns (Google Ads, Sklik, Facebook Ads and so on) (referred to as paid sources),
- from searches for keywords, articles and products on the search engines Seznam.cz and Google.com, or from typing in your website address directly (organic, unpaid source),
- from pages on the social networks Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and others (social network source).
Where the customer came from also helps you evaluate the return on campaigns. For some of them you also get the chance to lure the customer back to your website to finish the order by advertising the goods (so-called remarketing / retargeting). Thanks to measurement you also manage to build target groups – so-called audiences – thanks to which you target your ads better.
What Does the Visitor Do on Your Website?
The customer is on your website, you know where they came from and now you would like to know what the user does on the website. Which blog article caught their attention? Which products interest them, which do they put in the basket? Are they browsing your website on their computer, on a tablet, or on a mobile phone during the commute home from work? On most websites today, access from mobile devices accounts for more than 65% of visits.
Funnels or How Customers Get Through the Ordering Process
Using the measured data we can find out at which step users most often leave the ordering process without completing it. We can measure and evaluate how many users reached which stage of the order. Thanks to this we can potentially find out whether there is an error on the website that prevents customers from completing their order. A second bottleneck in the order can be excessive demands on the customer to fill in many details in forms. Without autofill, many users on mobile will not feel like filling in long forms. The measurement technology can also record which fields the user filled in and which they left, for example, empty.
Search
If you did not bring the customer to your website with a direct link to the page of a specific product, or if they are looking for more related goods from your range, they will certainly use the search.
Would you like to know what people most often search for on your website and what results they get? Do you want to check whether the search returns relevant results? In what order are they displayed? Did they look for a specific brand, for example? Did they filter goods by availability, price, special offers? We can measure, store and make use of all this valuable information!
Protection of Personal Data
And how can these statistics be collected, what about the protection of personal data? Using a suitable cookie banner will help you solve this problem. It allows you to collect information from users who give you their consent when they access your website.
And what about those who do not give you consent? There we can talk about so-called anonymous measurement, where it is still possible to measure many interesting values, but the context will be missing. You will not find out that a specific user performed several events in a row, that they returned to you after a few days or weeks and so on.
And what if you do not want to rely on storing your valuable data using cookies on the user's computer? The user can delete them without warning whenever they want! Even in this case we can help you with implementing measurement by the advanced server-side method. Your data is then stored directly on your server. Implementing this advanced measurement will require the work of a programmer and brings higher costs.
Business Reports, or the Output of the Measured Data
Every entrepreneur or company likes to follow business reports that allow them to improve and make better decisions based on measured data.
From the measured data we can build clear reports for you in which you will be able to see the data that is important for your decision-making and overview.
All business characteristics such as revenue, the most and least popular products, the most visited pages, the return on advertising campaigns – all of this and much more we can capture for you. You can also choose the sub-period for which the report is to be evaluated.
Now you know in brief what web analytics can do for you!
The Most Important Thing at the End!
The key with this technology is to get started! You get data for your evaluation only from the day you start measuring it (data cannot be obtained retroactively). Put yourself in the hands of experts and have them measure what is happening on your website.
Every company is at a different stage of development and therefore also has different analytical needs. We approach everyone differently and tailor our solutions. We offer a professional approach and many years of experience to companies that are at the beginning of their journey and are only launching their e-shop. At the same time we are more than able to take on very sophisticated clients who have processes, standards and many customers in place. In both cases you must count on web analytics being regarded as an investment.
How are you doing with marketing maturity? What scope of analytical services would be ideal for you? You can find all of this out here.
We can set up measurement for you in the new Google Analytics 4 environment, because the older technology Google Analytics 3 (Universal Analytics) will stop collecting data as early as July 2023!
Whether you are already measuring and need advice or something reconfigured, or you are just starting with measurement, we are here for you.
Get in touch and we will take care of everything for you!
