Business owners have long analyzed their customer, financial, and usage data to make wise decisions for the future. However, business decisions in modern times need to happen much faster than they once did.
Want to keep up with your competition and improve your online business? You’ll need to increasingly rely on real-time analytics to make conclusions and decisions rapidly as ecommerce growth continues.
They allow you to see important data related to your ecommerce business as soon as the information is gathered. Decreasing the delay between data acquisition and business decisions can help you to better reach your customers, make meaningful changes, and compete with similar businesses.
Unlike batch-style analytics that compile results from several days of data, real-time analytics assist you with staying current with customer trends and needs.
From reaching more consumers via social media to creating a better ecommerce customer experience overall, you can use these metrics to build a more relevant business.
If you’ve never used this type of data application, this article will show you just how much it can benefit you and your business!
Why should you use real-time metrics for your online store?
As an ecommerce business, you must stay competitive. This is due to the fact that increasing numbers of online stores are popping up every month.
You need to have a good understanding of what your customers want, how they behave, and what products or offers most appeal to them.
There are two major benefits to using real-time analytics for your business.
First, this data can help you make immediate changes that will affect your daily operations on your ecommerce website. Second, the data indicates if there are any technical issues or glitches on your site that need to be corrected for the optimal customer experience.
There are a variety of metrics that you can use for your store. By building an ecommerce dashboard that includes real-time analytics, you can better organize and keep track of the data that’s most relevant to your business.
For instance, you might want to monitor overall site traffic. This information can tell you if a particular post or a new product launch is increasing the number of visitors to your store and can aid in converting traffic to sales.
Real-time analytics can also show you your revenue at every point in the day. This allows you to catch underperforming times for your business and gives you the push you need to change your marketing strategies.
In addition, you might want to use real-time analytics to determine your conversion rate. This rate is the amount of online traffic that translates into actual purchases.
You may discover that there’s something keeping certain visitors who are only browsing from buying. You might also decide that a special offer on your platform can increase your conversion rate significantly.
Finally, you can monitor the overall health of your online store.
This could include general site speed, which translates into either a positive or negative browsing experience for your customers. It can also show you HTTP errors that could uncover broken links that are frustrating your site visitors.
Real-time metrics are more than just cool, new features that’ll boost your morale. They’ll also give you the information you require to make wise decisions as problems happen.
Furthermore, they’ll help you give your customers what they want, letting you increase your customer base and revenue over time.
How to use real-time analytics to improve your ecommerce business
We’ll now examine how you can best use the data you collect from real-time analytics to improve where your business is at today in specific ways.
This information will allow you to better compete with other online businesses, learn about key customer behaviors, and adapt to the ever-changing ecommerce market.
Here are 10 key ways that these metrics can be used by a majority of today’s ecommerce websites. Check them out below, and see if you can improve efficiency, conversion rates, and revenue in your ecommerce organization!
1. Utilize personalization
Ecommerce allows you to collect user data far more efficiently than ever before. While brick-and-mortar stores must rely on purchasing patterns and more difficult methods of counting customers, you have a distinct advantage as an online business.
Business News Daily notes that personal data about your customers could include their gender, age, IP address, engagement and behavioral data, and more.
By using the data you collect, you can personalize the web browsing experience for each customer via personal advertisements and online messaging.
Real-time analytics can show you the time that most people are browsing your store, where they’re located, and what type of device they are using for browsing.
A more personalized browsing experience can significantly improve the overall customer experience, which can lead to a higher conversion rate.
2. Maximize social media campaign success
According to Statista, over 91% of businesses in the United States were using their social media accounts to market products and services to their customers in 2020.
With social media marketing being such a crucial aspect of digital commerce and a lucrative option for growing your business, you want to make sure that you’re leveraging this resource adequately.
Real-time analytics can assist with this by showing you which of your posts most resonate with your followers and which are shared the most often.
Ecommerce websites frequently use their social media accounts for lead generation. By knowing which posts lead to the highest conversion rates, you can craft future posts and pictures to give you a competitive edge in your market.
While any social media data is helpful, data captured in real time makes it easiest to analyze customer metrics and make immediate changes if needed.
3. Use pattern recognition
With online sales, you can’t get out onto an actual sales floor to analyze what people are browsing or buying. However, real-time analytics let you do this by showing you patterns of behavior among your customers and throughout your site.
There are a variety of patterns you could choose to track. For example, you might want to see how many visitors from a particular region of the country browse online at a certain time of day. You may instead prefer to track customers who respond to certain types of images, headers, or posts over the span of a week.
Any pattern-tracking method can assist you with responding immediately to those marketing strategies that actually work and tailor future advertising campaigns to match. Over time, this can save you a significant amount of money on marketing costs.
4. Verify the methods required to sell certain products
Do you have a particular product that you want to sell on a specific day or week? If so, you can use real-time analytics to understand more about the people visiting your store during that period.
These fast metrics let you see what these customers require and to what type of marketing they best respond. If a particular product isn’t selling well, you can immediately change your marketing or sales tactics to improve conversions.
When you notice your customer subgroups changing over the course of time, you can change your promotional campaigns to match your customers’ needs and move products off the virtual shelves!
5. Keep an eye on revenue goals
Maybe you’re currently reviewing your revenue statistics infrequently and seeing how they match up to data collected a month or even a year ago.
However, real-time metrics reveal how your revenue compares to a different time period on the same day or to the revenue collected last week. This helps you set more appropriate daily targets and change your marketing strategies in real time to get the sales you need.
The key to meeting and even exceeding your revenue goals is increasing your conversion rate. Your real-time metrics let you follow each of your customers through the entire process of entering your site. This can include activities like browsing, adding items to their carts, and ultimately completing their purchases.
You may find that you’re not meeting your desired conversion rate after getting to know your typical audience. In this case, you can modify your strategies for customer interactions in real time rather than waiting for the future.
6. Study the traffic from different referral sources
With historical or batch-style data, you can determine what referral sources are most beneficial for you. However, real-time data can give you immediate information that can aid you in catching any missed opportunities and improving your marketing statistics quickly.
For example, you might notice that one of your social media accounts is attracting more customer traffic than another source. You could then allocate more of your marketing budget to that platform and pull some of your advertisements on the secondary source.
Keep in mind that certain marketing campaigns may bring in more customers from one referral source than other campaigns will. This means that you’ll need to check real-time data regularly for the best results.
7. Enhance customer service
According to Forbes, 96% of consumers base their loyalty on the quality of customer service they receive from a business. In addition, 73% of businesses that perform better than their competitors in the realm of customer service also end up improving their finances as well.
A great way to determine what perceptions your customers have of your store is to survey them directly. Real-time analytics can collect survey results immediately and let you make quick changes to your overall customer service.
Another key way to check how your customer service team is faring is to review complaints and positive comments on your social media sites. Responding to these comments visibly and immediately is vital to retaining customers.
Real-time metrics allow you to combine data from numerous sources to improve customer satisfaction quickly.
8. Check reports to troubleshoot problems
Real-time analytical reports let you see where any potential problems in your ecommerce website lie. You can immediately troubleshoot any problems that arise to improve your conversion rate.
Your metrics should ideally let you examine certain key numbers. For example, you’ll be able to see how many visitors filled their carts but didn’t check out and can then target these individuals with marketing emails.
Furthermore, you can determine which products are underperforming or not selling at all. You’ll also be able to review which pages are being viewed the most and how many customers left your site after only viewing one page.
9. Employ dynamic pricing strategically
With today’s ecommerce, it’s important to be dynamic in the way that you reach out to customers, market your products, and even price your items.
Real-time data shows how your products are performing compared to those of your competitors and which price points are most appealing to your customers.
Dynamic pricing based on the current trends you see lets you optimize your sales prices to improve conversion rates at any time of the day. Modern shoppers can immediately compare online prices between websites with only a few clicks.
For this reason, it’s vital that yours remain competitive rather than static.
H3: 10. Improve inventory management
Perhaps your ecommerce business is small enough for you to stock all of your products on site. Maybe it’s alternatively large enough that you’ve outsourced your inventory management and shipping solutions.
Either way, real-time analytics can help you keep up with product demand. This then decreases the likelihood that products will go out of stock or that you’re left with too many of a particular item.
These metrics also highlight which products are most in demand on any particular day or week. This is particularly important during high-traffic seasons for your business, such as during the summer or over the holidays, depending on your product lines.
As you see demand rising, you can respond ahead of time by creating new inventory stocking strategies.
Conclusion
As the popularity of online shopping doesn’t seem like it’ll be dying out anytime soon, it’s more important than ever that your knowledge of where your ecommerce business stands is as up to date as possible.
Getting a handle on your store’s real-time analytics can take a bit of time initially, but carefully tracking these important metrics for your business is well worth the effort.
These 10 tips for using the data you collect should help you to better reach your customers, improve your conversion rates, attain your financial goals, and increase customer loyalty!
