Either big or small, you have the data but do you use it?

Nowadays, the trend in measuring the success of an e-commerce business is being more and more focused on Conversion Rate which is still acceptable since how much money you rise in your business is an important indicator (yet it is not the only indication of running a sustainable business). On the other hand, you can not increase your Conversion Rate by only measurement or tracking it via Google Analytics.  No no, “the power of big data” quote is not coming next, but either big or small, you have the data generated by your customers or visitors and actually it is another type of language between you and them. The quicker you get used to their language, the better you will understand them (and yes this will increase your Conversion Rate for sure).

“You should measure” could be end of this post but it will not be enough to help since this could easily be listed as a hurdle for e-commerce managers among all other core activities among logistics, delivery, payments and etc if you do not have enough resources. That is why, the main purpose of this post is “you need a hand in measurement”.

Furthermore, the frightening lists such as Top X Data Sets Every E-commerce Company Should Measure, Y Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for Ecommerce, Z eCommerce Metrics You Need to Be Tracking and etc. (have you realised the different spellings of ecommerce, leaving the variation of lists behind even the way they spell the business do not match) might discourage you from dealing with the data. 

The solution is using tools that are easy to integrate with your site and includes built-in reports that help you to track major e-commerce metrics. Google Analytics does this to some extent but you should customise so much to have a clear view on where you should focus on your conversion funnel. In addition to using analytics only tools, you should expect helpful reports from any tool you use.

What is Widget View Measurement by using data?

For example, in Segmentify, we provide real-time reporting of success of our smart recommendations as expected. We provide the Click-Through-Rate and Conversion Rate of our recommendations in real-time. We track various additional metrics such as “Widget View” which represents actual impression of each recommendation widget by the users.
This parameter falls dramatically on Product Pages for the “You might also like these” widgets when the widget replaced below the “Product Description and Details” part. As you might expect, this metric is not equal to product view since the customers need to scroll the page to see the recommendation widgets. According to our measurements, the widget view rate average is around 10% when the widget is replaced below the “Product Description and Details” part . On the other hand, putting this wizard just above the description part at least triples the widget view rate (the average becomes 30% and the maximum we measured is 54%).

This is a clear representation of interest of your visitors on various parts of your site. Heat maps provide similar representation for sure, but with accurate evaluation of widget view parameter in Segmentify, not only the effect of positions of such (product recommendation) widgets to view rates but also CTR (Click Through Rate) and event to Conversion Rates.
To sum up, visitors provide data for you with their behaviour on your web site. The more you are able to dig into data, the more value you can gather. This needs effort for sure, but it worths putting such effort. Finally, any tool you use should help you in this process to get the maximum value with minimum efforts by visualising value.