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Ecommerce reports come with a handful of benefits.
To begin with, they show essential data on your sales, finances, marketing, and anything else you want to track.
By delivering such critical data, ecommerce reports help you make informed business decisions for growing your sales and revenue while improving customer experience.
In fact, their importance can’t be undermined as 60% of our contributors say regularly monitoring performance from their ecommerce reporting software is crucial. and 37.1% think studying these reports is very important.
The only catch here? You can’t keep an eye out on every other ecommerce report that’s out there. Doing so, only dilutes key data, which can easily slip from your attention.
So to save you from this issue, we put together this post that rounds up the most important ecommerce reports that you should be tracking. Here’s a quick list followed by the details:
Dig in.
“A store conversion report is a must for any Ecommerce store owner,” suggests Tyler Wall from SD Bullion. “The report gives you insights into the number of visitors and how many of them completed a purchase on your website.”
Having these details can help you grow your business in multiple ways. Wall sums these benefits as “opportunities for creating optimization and retention strategies, as well as improving your marketing tactics.”
To elaborate, the details you drive from the store conversion report help you see what’s working and what’s not, assisting you in deciding where to best allot resources.
Similarly, you can use the report to remarket to prospects who were close to buying from you but didn’t. How? By getting a list of visitors who didn’t purchase (find their names in the second last step in your conversion report). Then re-engaging those people by sending them a promo code, for instance.
Interestingly, Wall isn’t the only one who thinks the conversion rate report is the most important ecommerce report. The majority of respondents, about 32%, are on the same page.
In addition to the store conversion rate report, 20% say the total sales report is an essential one. On the other hand, 8% agree that the returning customer rate and total orders reports are the most important.
Here is an example of a conversion report for ecommerce business from Databox. With this dashboard template, you’ll be able to track customer loyalty and repeat sales over time.
A marketing report is another super important report for any business – not just online stores. As Adam Wood from RevenueGeeks puts it: “Every business, whether it’s an Ecommerce store, a specialized blog, a portfolio website, or a company’s official website, needs analytics.”
Wood highlights: “The marketing report shows how many visitors visited your store as a result of your marketing activities, such as UTM campaigns, social media ads, or Google Shopping ads. Marketing efforts must still be tracked via Google Analytics and Shopify has clear guidance on how to do so.”
Use the information from this report to improvise your marketing strategy and stop investing in campaigns that aren’t working.
He is an example of a marketing report for online stores from Databox. This eCommerce full-funnel dashboard gives you unique insights into your funnel data and helps you track key metrics that’ll inform you which stage of your conversion funnel needs to be optimized.
PRO TIP: Now you can create automatically generated reports in marketing reporting tools such as Databox. Based on data from the various tools and platforms that have been integrated with Databox, such as Google Analytics, HubSpot, and Facebook Ads, you can save time and resources, while gaining valuable insights into your marketing efforts.
ROPO or research online, purchase offline report is another essential report among the Ecommerce reports that you need to be tracking.
“ROPO analysis (research online, purchase offline) has been a common trend in Ecommerce businesses,” notes Simon Brisk from Click Intelligence.
Use it to:
Brisk continues this report is also helpful for determining the customer lifetime value of buyers who learn and research about your business online but purchase offline.
“LTV analysis Customer lifetime value comes in handy when forecasting future revenues. According to a study, there is a 60%-70% chance of existing customers making a purchase. As compared to only 5%-10% for new customers. So, businesses can figure out the value per customer and decide on how much to spend on each of them,” adds Brisk.
Related: 18 Tips for Increasing Your Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV)
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.
Not only does social media help increase brand awareness for your shop, but it helps grow sales and nurture relationships with prospects and customers alike. It’s why tracking performance makes social media reports so essential for every Ecommerce business.
Related: 7 Of The Most Common Challenges Of Social Media Reporting and Tips to Overcome Them.
“The secret to maintaining popularity and relevance as an online business is cultivating your relationship with your customers,” observes Financer’s Johannes Larsson.
“Social media reports give invaluable data and insights on the status of a business’s social media engagement. When they see problem areas, they can devise solutions to remedy these issues before damaging their reputation or losing followers.”
Here is an example of a social media report from Databox that gives you a full summary of your social profiles across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.
Modelers Central’s Gary Renshaw observes “the performance of an ecommerce site is measured by its sales performance, thus the sales report is a must-have for any ecommerce store owner.”
Renshaw also shares what your sales report should cover:
With that, it’s essential you take actionable steps based on what you find in your sales reports. For an underperforming product, for example, investigate what could be the cause of the poor sales and how can you remedy it? Is it additional shipping costs? Or has it got something to do with the product quality.
In a nutshell, “It’s wonderful to see sales and revenue, highlight what is going well in your sales reports, but it’s even more important to know what’s going wrong, so you can investigate and improve using an ecommerce sales dashboard,” as Renshaw puts it.
Related: The 23 Most Important Ecommerce KPIs for Tracking & Growing Sales.
Jonathan Aufray from Growth Hackers goes on to point out the value of the sales month on month report for identifying big picture trends.
Aufray says, “Not only do you want to track the sales you’re making with your store overview dashboard, the store conversion rate or the CLV (Customer Lifetime Value), you also want to understand the trend. What you want to track is the growth of your sales week after week, month after month, quarter after quarter, or year after year.”
“So, what you want is to show the growth in terms of sales,” Aufray continues. “How many sales did you do this quarter compared to last quarter? If that number increases over time, your Ecommerce store is growing and going in the right direction.”
But while it’s crucial you look at this report generated from your sales dashboard software on a monthly basis, 52.9%, the majority, of our respondents track their Ecommerce reports weekly. Tracking reports monthly is the second most popular option with 41.2% into it. Only 5.9% look at their online retail reports daily.
Here is an example of an online sales report from Databox. This Google Analytics Ecommerce Sales dashboard analyzes which factors lead to sales for your ecommerce shop.
This one of the Ecommerce reports is crucial for keeping an eye out on customer order statuses.
Essentially, “the Order Fulfillment Report provides information about customer shipments, including tracking numbers for individual packages,” explains Katherine Brown from Spyic. “Hence, managers know when they have been shipped off and how many items were included in a particular shipment.”
Having this information at hand is critical for solving any customer queries related to shipping and returns that may come in.
This report is also important for those of you who are aiming to improve customer experience by offering free and fast delivery – something that 79.3% say is important to them with 28.6% admitting delivery dates influence their buying decisions.
Tiffanie Hartenstein from ORACLE Lighting adds another important report to this list of Ecommerce reports.
Related: Google Analytics for Ecommerce: 14 Tips for Measuring Your Online Store.
Hartenstein thinks “the Google Analytics Goal Flow report is an absolute must in Ecommerce because it shows you all of the key metrics of a sale from open to close.” This makes it super useful for tracking your customer’s journey as well as identifying places where conversions drop.
“For ecommerce, moving a potential buyer to a confirmed buyer in a seamless and streamlined process is really our bread and butter,” Hartenstein admits. “Goal Flow reports help us see where buyers can get stuck and help you increase your conversation rate, which means more sales and happier customers!”
Here is an example of a Google Analytics report for ecommerce businesses from Databox. This dashboard gives you full insight into your ecommerce store’s performance.
Cohort analysis lets you group shoppers based on shared traits to track and understand their actions.
According to Aviad Faruzo of Faruzo the report “actually gives the managers a comprehensive view of how their customers tend to behave.” The information it provides helps you make more informed product decisions that, in turn, help you grow revenue.
At their organization, Faruzo shares they use the report and it “greatly helps us identify which kind of consumer is changing their spending pattern, who is dissatisfied and how we should change our marketing and selling tactics. Using this gives great insights into the existing customers an e-commerce business has.”
Pro tip: Identifying your customers’ purchase habits will help you determine the popularity of your products, and adjust your strategy to increase your sales.
Watch the following Data Snack to learn:
And, finally, Ian Sells RebateKey outlines the mobile performance report is a key Ecommerce report to track. “A lot of users, especially online shoppers, use their phones to browse and shop.”
Statistically speaking, mobile Ecommerce sales have increased by a staggering 39.1% from 2016 when it was 52.4% to the present 72.9% market share.
This means optimizing for mobile is a must. And, fortunately, this report gives you the data you need. You’ll find “data about the UX, page load time, and conversion rates based on devices [here],” says Sells. Of course, optimizing based on the data you get from here is an effective way to grow your revenue.
Related: A Beginner’s Guide to Mobile Website Optimization
By tracking these Ecommerce reports, you can focus on improving all the important aspects of growing an online store. Be sure to look at the data on your ecommerce dashboard weekly or monthly and make informed decisions accordingly.
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Masooma is a freelance writer for SaaS and a lover to-do lists. When she's not writing, she usually has her head buried in a business book or fantasy novel.
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