The first impression which we get when someone talks about e-commerce is very much coherent for all of us. An activity which involves buying & selling of goods/services over an electronic medium is the basic idea that we have extracted from a much larger scenario.
However, if we want to delve into greater detail then e-commerce could be seen as a much larger domain consisting of multiple sub-domains under it. E-Commerce encompasses multiple kinds of activities into its domain. Online shopping, electronic payments, virtual auctions, online ticketing etc. are all examples of e-commerce activity. However, these activities may vary greatly depending on the type of e-commerce business.
Ecommerce businesses have also evolved much since its inception. Through the journey of its evolvement, we have seen various kinds of transactions at various levels in the e-commerce businesses. In order to keep any type of business running, multiple peoples are involved & continuous transactions happen between them. Based on such business behaviors, we are now finally able to classify them into multiple categories.
Some of those categories are
- Business-to-Business (B2B)
- Business-to-Consumer (B2C)
- Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C)
- Consumer-to-Business (C2B)
- Business-to-Administration (B2A)
- Consumer-to-Administration (C2A)
The motive to point out the distinction between business types is just to outline the basic difference that they all inherit. The range of activities involved on all these businesses may vary greatly due to their specific operational nature.
In this fast moving & continuously developing world, the needs and demands of customers are also changing by each passing day. To maintain the pace with these ever-changing demands of customers, merchants/business owners also need to devise plans which could prevent businesses from unprecedented shocks.
But, the innately present question still persists. That, how can we ever know of fluctuations in demands of goods/services beforehand? The answer may surprise you, but the truth is that we can’t. We can only estimate changes up to a certain extent & we can never be sure of that too. But we ought to do our part, no?
Here, integrating some tools of analytics in the store might prove beneficial. The analytical tools present you the various kind of data on its dashboard related to your customers, visitors shopping behavior on your shop.
The kinds of data that an analytics dashboard generally include are:
- Visits
- Total Revenue
- Transactions
- Average Order Value
- Conversion Rate
- Active Visitors
- Traffic Sources etc.
The list goes on but we will get back to the dashboards and the features that it entails with it later in the blog.
At first, the Google analytics dashboards may also seem as overwhelming to otherwise capable merchants. And, this is only the prime reason why such merchants never want to step beyond basic dashboards showing site metrics, number of visits etc.
Hence, before integrating Google analytics reports into client's store, we also need to assess the familiarity of such clients with tools of analytics. As, it might be possible that a sudden introduction of such dashboards could result to aversion towards them & client no longer intends to use analytics tool at the store at all.
To mitigate the effects of such aversion, it’s good that now we have an option to customize the templates according to the needs of client. And, the issue of complex dashboards can now easily be solved by custom analytics templates available in the market.
So, now let's quickly head on to the templates section. What are the available options & how they are beneficial? The first one in the list is
1.Engagement, Loyalty and Traffic Growth Dashboard by Cemal Buyukgokcesu
This dashboard with an average user rating of 4.5 helps you to analyze the performance of your visitors on your website from all types of devices. It provides you with following details about your store:
- Number of sessions for the selected time period
- Sessions by different sources like email, organic search, social paid etc.
- Sessions by location
- Mobile traffic quality (Sessions Vs. Bounce rate)
- Overall bounce rate for the selected time period
- Sessions by mobile devices
- Referrals via social sites
2.Social Media Analytics Dashboard by Justin Cutroni
The dashboard presents you the data of traffic acquired through social media websites. With an average rating of 4.1, it is helping merchants to determine the level of help they are getting from their social media activity in conversions on their websites. The social media dashboard consists following data
- New visitor acquisition from social sites
- Total sessions of various users from different social media websites & bounce rate
- Total number of sessions & average time on the page from social media websites via various mobile devices
- List of the contents which was shared most across social platforms
- Total revenue generated from various social site referrals & average value spent by users per session.
- Total number of users from social sites.
- Conversion rate from social sites for the selected time period
3. SEO Dashboard by Kevin Pike
The SEO dashboard by Kevin Pike tops the list in this category. It helps to measure the performance of website in terms of search. The dashboard with an average user rating of 4.1 provides you the data of landing pages in terms of goal completion & bounce rate for your website.
The advantage of using this SEO dashboard could be summed up in following points:
- It lists the landing pages bringing quality visitors to the website.
- Provides the name of landing pages having high bounce rates.
- It also consists the name of the landing pages that have generated most conversions.
- View the name of the most popular pages appearing in organic search
- Lists the keywords driving visitors to the website.
4.Mobile Commerce Dashboard by Justin Cutroni
Out of several dashboards available for mobile commerce, Justin Cutroni’s dashboard takes the lead again. The dashboard with an average user rating of 4 provides various important data related to customers who are using your website specifically on mobile or tablet.
Few characteristics of the dashboard are enlisted below:
- Total revenue generated via various channels (email, organic, referral etc.)
- Provides the list of most popular pages on mobile & tablet devices
- Comparison of revenue generated via website & mobile.
- Average mobile cart abandonment rate
- Top selling products on mobile & tablet devices.
At last but not the least, the Google analytics team launched this dashboard back in 2013 in a bundle named “New Google Analytics User Starter Bundle”.
5.Site Performance Dashboard from Google Analytics
Being acquainted with the performance of the website at any given time is very much important for the business to succeed. The dashboard will help you to identify the issues with your site speed & performance. Redressal of such issues will help to improve the user-experience of your website.
The various metrics present in the dashboard are:
- Average page load time & server response time
- Country wise average redirection time (in sec) & page views
- Loading time of the mobile page
- Browser wise loading time of the webpage
- Average loading time of the various pages & their total views.
Conclusion
At last I’d like to mention some words of wisdom. In case, if you are constantly making efforts to make your business succeed then you’d also want to analyze the results of your regular efforts. Adding these custom dashboards into your store will not only help you to know your store’s performance. But they can also help to know the areas where the performance is not even satisfactory. Identify the domains or areas of low performance & work on it to improve the productivity of store.
