As of 2018, its estimated that the number of people using analytics in some form is as many as 30-50 million.
With the knowledge of that fact, many business owners wonder:
- What exactly is “analytics”?
- What is it used for?
- Is it bad to use it?
- How do I use analytics tools for ecommerce?
With the emergence of Facebook and Cambridge Analytics playing a role in influencing the last United States election, analytics has been brought into the spotlight for many business owners and layman alike.
Analytics is essentially the process of capturing relevant data from individuals within set parameters that are analyzed and used to influence campaigns or other operations.
The Funnel
The questions that come after all boil down to one thing when looked at in a practical sense: the funnel.
Let’s begin with the visualization of a funnel. Funnels are a widely used term to describe the process that occurs in any level of business that goes from leads or visitors until they are converted into performing a particular task or completing an action.
That can mean the steps that happen from when people who come to find your website to when they buy something. That’s usually the application, but it can even be as simple as the process of turning site visitors into leads via getting their information.
Every step in the funnel can be very similar or completely different when compared to your competitors or other brands within your niche.
For some reason, a fraction of site owners or people who use the web for business use analytics. Beyond that, an even smaller fraction understand what the data they get means.
What Are Examples Of Info You Can Get From Analytics
Put simply; you can find out almost anything useful to your business about your customers/site visitors. People who come across your campaigns or website can be tracked based on a cookie that can let you know everything from:
- Age
- Interests
- Things they’ve bought
- Things they’ve searched for
- Things they want to buy
- Things they are searching for
- What they like
- What they don’t like
- And beyond
On a more simple site level, you can use analytics to understand any point in your funnel that is failing.
- How long people are spending on particular pages.
- How much money your best customers are spending.
- How much your worst ones are.
- How many people buy on your site the first time they visit.
- Which products get the most attention and make money.
- Which products don’t get attention and make no money.
- Which products get attention and make no money and vice versa.
What Can You Use The Data For?
The entire point of analyzing data is to optimize your funnel or sales process. You can discover aspects of what works and what doesn’t ranging from headers to design to copy. From the data itself, you can build a plan for reworking or split testing pages or products for customers with certain backgrounds or locations to ensure you make the most out of each campaign that is run.
The more data that you have, the more quality it is, the more you can infer about what you and your team can do to make the profit higher.
