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From improving your eCommerce conversion rate to heatmapping, eCommerce analytics tools can provide valuable intel into how users interact with your website.
However, with over 116 eCommerce analytics tools, it can be overwhelming to know what a tool does and when you need it. So, we asked 30 eCommerce businesses and agencies to share what analytics tools they are using these days.
Let’s dive in.
One of the biggest factors to consider when choosing an eCommerce analytics tool is how it integrates with your eCommerce platform. For 80% of the respondents we surveyed, this meant Shopify or WooCommerce.
Related: Ecommerce Analytics 101: How to Drive More Online Sales With Data
When researching the most popular e-commerce analytics tools, we also asked our respondents what some of the additional things they consider when evaluating ecommerce tools are. For the 30 people we surveyed, those were the full support of your business’s requirements, price, advanced analytics, and additional integrations.
Now let’s find out which tools our respondents consider the best. For added context, we surveyed 30 people with 73.33% working in an eCommerce business and the remaining working for eCommerce agencies.
Databox makes it easy to monitor the most important KPIs across your eCommerce business in one place. With over 70 integrations, including Google Sheets and Excel, you can pull in and sync all of your data directly to your dashboard. So, you can build it once, and it will update in real-time.
Not to mention, there are hundreds of pre-built Shopify dashboard templates you can use or modify as you see fit, if you don’t want to start from scratch.
“With Databox, we can visualize KPIs easily, and it has hundreds of pre-built templates which can be customized using its dashboard designers,” says Nick Yu of BeadNova. “We can set goals and track performance anywhere, from any device. Databox updates its users about metrics by sending notifications, scorecards, and alerts. The dashboard provides a unified view of your website’s data and analytics metrics across multiple locations and devices. It also allows us to create, edit and manage any content, which is the major challenge we have solved using this dashboard.”
Richard Clews of pantsandsocks.com adds, “Databox is fantastic for focusing marketing efforts and was a huge part of our customer journey mapping. Being able to understand how to best provide value for our audiences across different channels was a big win for creating efficiency and saving money.”
The best part: Databox has a forever free plan, which includes all standard features, 3 data source connections, and 100+ integrations. Paid plans start at $72 per month.
To improve the performance of your online store, it’s vital to have access to useful and actionable data. But, with so many metrics available to track, it may be hard to determine which ones will actually help you move the needle. That’s why we have created a concise Shopify dashboard template that only tracks the most important metrics for analyzing the core elements of your ecommerce store, such as:
Now you can benefit from the experience of our Shopify experts, who have put together a plug-and-play Databox template showing the most important KPIs for monitoring your online store’s performance. It’s simple to implement and start using as a standalone dashboard or in ecommerce reports, and best of all, it’s free!
You can easily set it up in just a few clicks – no coding required.
To set up the dashboard, follow these 3 simple steps:
Step 1: Get the template
Step 2: Connect your Shopify account with Databox.
Step 3: Watch your dashboard populate in seconds.
It should come as no surprise that 70% of the eCommerce companies we surveyed are using Google Analytics. Google Analytics is free to use, relatively easy to set up, and you can mine a lot of data from it.For instance, you can use Google Analytics to see what channels are driving the most traffic and sales, most visited pages on your website, and how your paid marketing campaigns are performing.
“We’ve tried a few different options, but our current favorite is Google Analytics,” says Kate Zhang of Kate Backdrop. “It’s free, which is great, and it’s really user-friendly. Plus, the insights we’ve gleaned from it have been invaluable in helping us grow our business. We’ve been able to track which products are selling well, where our website traffic is coming from, and what marketing campaigns are most effective. All this information has helped us focus our efforts and make better decisions about where to allocate our resources.”
Tiffanie Hartenstein of ORACLE Lighting agrees, “For ORACLE Lighting’s eCommerce analytics, we find that Google Analytics integrated into Shopify to be the best analytics tool. Our eCommerce store is located on the Shopify platform, and Shopify’s seamless integration of Google Analytics allows us to easily measure transactions, revenue, and more!
The benefits of using Google Analytics with Shopify for our eCommerce business include understanding how we can best serve our customers by understanding what they are looking for (and whether they find it) when they come to our online store. Since we design products in addition to selling them, effective understanding of data analytics facilitated by these tools also guides our decisions about developing products that meet our customers’ needs.”
Clare Jones of Custom Neon adds, “At Custom Neon, we are fastidious about monitoring GA and, in particular, making use of its Users Flow and Behavior Flow data to better understand the movements of customers throughout our site. We use tools like Hotjar and Google Analytics to gain valuable insight into metrics such as task success rate and completion time, conversion rate, error rate, and the number of tasks completed via website navigation or search.
GA enables us to identify where our site traffic is coming from, how users convert, and if they aren’t converting, at what point are they bouncing. This allows us to monitor and amend pages that have the highest bounce rates, and leave pages that engage users for longer. These metrics all inform our approach toward UX and serve as the building blocks for future design revisions. Hotjar also allows us to see detailed heat maps outlining the most clicked areas on our pages, data that informs the placement of links, images, and text. Identifying drop-off points has prompted us to create better content and incorporate more intuitive user-friendly navigation, including the use of breadcrumbs.
As you can see from the image above, Databox integrates with Google Analytics helping you get the most out of your data. Connect your GA account with Databox for free here.
Related: 8 Essential Ecommerce Google Analytics Dashboards Recommended by Ecommerce Experts
If your focus is on improving your website’s conversion rate, Lucky Orange is a solid tool. Key features include session recordings, dynamic heatmaps, surveys, visitor profiles, live chat, and conversion funnels to name a few. This allows you to understand what users are doing on your website.
“My top recommended analytics tool is a heatmap for your website,” says Lexi Boese of The Digital Opportunists. “I personally use LuckyOrange for my clients. Heatmaps give you a granular understanding of how people are interacting with your website. Not only that, but it tracks every visitor from the first page to checkout or abandoned cart. This benefits my clients because we are able to optimize our websites specifically to customers’ preferences. We’re able to discover where they are most likely to click, how far down the page they scroll, and any similarities in the abandoned cart orders.With one of my eCommerce clients, we noticed that we were getting a handful of traffic on the front page header, so we moved it from a description to an immediate call to action. We immediately saw a 17% increase in sales. After reviewing a heatmap, one of my clients redesigned their product pages to put the purchase button where the majority of people were clicking, and we saw a 30% increase in converted orders. No other platform can give you such an honest look at your customers as a heatmap.”
Lucky Orange has a free version for small stores with 500 page views or less per month. Paid plans start at $18 per month.
Just like Lucky Orange, Crazy Egg is another tool that eCommerce brands can use to understand what users are doing on their website. You can do heatmapping, surveys, and session recording.
However, one key difference between this tool and Lucky Orange is its advanced A/B testing and error tracking capabilities. This can be particularly useful for high traffic, high order volume eCommerce merchants.
“This cutting-edge analytics tool will assist you in analyzing and making better use of the traffic data from your eCommerce store in order to provide a better experience for your customers,” says Luke Lee of Palaleather. “It gives me quick access to data on analytics dashboards that are simple to navigate, allowing me to improve the choices that I make. My company is able to better understand how our e Commerce shop functions and behaves on a variety of devices as a direct result of using this service. It is applicable to businesses of any size and can be utilize for analytical purposes for more advanced segmentation. Ecommerce shops can acquire deeper insights into their consumer base and obtain important data to help them develop an immersive online experience for each and every visitor who comes from a certain niche market. What a definition of modernism!”
Crazy Egg pricing starts at $29 per month for up to 30,000 tracked page views. While they don’t offer a free version, they do have a 30-day free trial.
Woopra makes it easier for brands to see what users are doing on their website. It allows you to map customer journeys and analyze growth and retention trends.
“This is a solution for product analytics that includes capabilities that are designed to analyze user journeys from beginning to end,” says Dean Lee of Sealions. “We are able to lessen the likelihood of orders being forgotten about thanks to Woopra’s assistance in locating drop-off places. The software also enables us to use triggers to conduct real-time actions based on the behavior of users, and this capability is really useful. You are able to connect with the appropriate audience and tailor your message by delivering relevant offers or communications to them. It helps quantify the average amount of time that clients take to decide whether or not to make a purchase. It examines the rates of client abandonment to determine the circumstances under which they occur.”
Woopra has a free plan with up to 500k actions and 90 days of data. Paid plans start at $349 per month.
Similar to Crazy Egg and Lucky Orange, Hotjar is a popular heatmap and survey analytics tool. Over 900,000 websites, including some eCommerce brands, use it to record sessions, view heatmaps, and collect survey feedback from site users.
For instance, Andres Ossa of Mudango says, “At Mudango, we believe it is important to understand the performance of your site both internally and externally. In other words, you must be sure your site is performing well once a potential customer is using it, but you must also be sure that your site is ranking properly and performing properly in relevant acquisition channels like Google.
In that sense, we believe the most useful tools are two: – Internal Performance: Hotjar. The improvements and insights you can find with heatmaps and recordings are just amazing. Without Hotjar we wouldn’t be selling as much as we are for sure.
External Performance: Google Search Console. It might sound lame, but going straight to the root is a good alternative to see why your site is or is not ranking in your relevant keywords. Google Search Console gives you alerts for every relevant KPI and you can re-submit your site to Google after each improvement.”
They have a basic free plan with up to 1,050 sessions per month. Paid plans start at $32 per month.
When you are just starting out and don’t have many sales, then you can get what you need from Shopify’s default analytics. You’ll be able to see basic sales and inventory data.
“Shopify provides valuable insights into your website traffic and conversion rate and goes one step further by offering built-in reporting tools that show you which products are selling the most and where your traffic is coming from,” says Todd Saunders of Big Safety. “This information can be used to make strategic decisions about which products to promote and how to market your store. While Shopify does have a learning curve, its user-friendly interface and extensive documentation make it relatively easy to use.”
Not to mention, just like Google Analytics, Shopify’s built-in analytics come standard. So, you don’t have to pay extra for it.
If you want to get the most out of Shopify analytics, connecting your account with Databox may help you get more insights to grow your online store. Integrate Shopify with Databox here.
Related: Shopify Reporting Guide: How to Get the Most Out of Built-In Shopify Reports
While there are no shortage of excellent eCommerce analytics tools available, the top three to check out are:
Related: The 17 Best eCommerce Tools for Growing Your Online Store
If you are looking for a simple way to stay on top of your eCommerce business’s performance, you can create a dashboard in minutes using our drag-and-drop interface. You can also connect hundreds of data sources automatically, including Shopify, WooCommerce, Excel, Google Sheets, and Google Analytics. Ready to create your first eCommerce performance dashboard? Create your free Databox account here.
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Jessica Malnik is a content strategist and copywriter for SaaS and productized service businesses. Her writing has appeared on The Next Web, Social Media Examiner, SEMRush, CMX, Help Scout, Convince & Convert, and many other sites.
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