One of our trusted partners, OpsWay, are experts in eCommerce website and apps, so they know a thing or two about the best analytics tools to use for these websites. They’ve kindly listed their top five must-have analytics tools for eCommerce businesses – read below to find out what they recommend.

The first thing that every eCommerce entrepreneur should do before the launch is to choose and set up an analytics tool that suits business needs perfectly. This is something that requires not only money, but time – our most precious resource.

There are so many tools out there today that you can spend weeks just trying to list all of them. How to figure out which one is the best? Well, the issue is that the best tool for one eCommerce store isn’t necessarily the best tool for another one.

In this article, I have listed the top five best eCommerce analytics tools (which you probably haven’t seen before) that could be a good fit for your eCommerce store, regardless of the size of your business.

What types of data do you need to track?

Before we get started with the actual tools, let’s figure out what kind of data do you need to track and analyze. Usually, in e-commerce there are multiple, disparate sources of data that need to be correlated to get valuable insights.

  1. Web analytics: this data gives you insight on who are your visitors, how did they find your website, their behaviour and targeted actions. It can easily be measured by Google Analytics but there is a bunch of other tools that are specially developed to suite eCommerce needs.
  2. Transactional data: this type of data usually requires analysis in real-time. It is recommended to either build your own solution (but this is pretty expensive) or use a tool that is flexible enough and has plenty of customisable options.
  3. Customer data (Qualitative data): This kind of data will help you to find an answer to WHY your users perform these or that actions. It is especially important in ecommerce, where you need to understand what impacts their purchasing decision.

How to track?

Once you have identified all the necessary types of data to track, it’s time to take a look at the top 5 tools for your eCommerce business:

1. Metrilo

Metrilo is an actionable analytics platform that combines analytics, CRM and automated email marketing system. That means you can act based on the reports you’ve just seen.

What’s more, this tool includes Retention analysis, which can help you understand your customer lifecycle and send out some useful content at the right time to the right client. Also, Metrilo integrates well with WooCommerce, Magento, and Shopify and syncs historical data.

In short, this tool gives you powerful eCommerce analytics that will help you fine-tune your marketing activities and boost sales.

2. Betaout

betaout dashboard analytics

Betaout is an omnichannel marketing automation tool which is developed specially for eCommerce. Founded in 2014, with an aim to “Humanize E-commerce Experience”, Betaout offers a comprehensive marketing automation & analytics tool that has the next features:

  1. Measure the effectiveness of all marketing activities in one place including Email, Mobile Push, On-site, Browser Push, Cart Recovery, Facebook Retargeting, Live Chat and SMS.
  2. Track the total number of orders placed and total revenue earned (including orders coming from new vs returning customers).
  3. Perform RFM Analytics
  4. Use Customer Grid dashboard to see all you need in one place (updated in real-time).

However, there some cons:

  1. UX, sometimes it’s little hard to navigate and understand the operation of the components
  2. Usage of certain UI components can be improved
  3. May have minor bugs and work a  little slow

All in all, this tool is a great is a great solution if you want to have all in one place. Despite possible cons, the design of this tool is intuitive in use and there is an online training available too.

3. Clicky

clicky analytics dashboard

One thing that makes Clicky so popular is the fact that it is extremely easy to use. It is a popular tool for small and mid-size businesses with a rich set of features. Clicky provides all the data in real time, which means that you can react immediately and make proper decisions.

Here is a short review of benefits:

  1. Ajax and Flash events tracking
  2. Real-time monitoring & goal tracking
  3. Integration plugins for a number of CMSs, forums and eCommerce platforms.

Drawbacks:

  1. “Outdated” design
  2. Some reports are only available for a fixed period of time

All in all, Clicky would be a good choice for companies with a limited budget and for those owners, who like simplicity.

4. RetentionGrid

RetentionGrid is a fancy-looking analytics tool that provides insights about your website visitors in easy to understand colour-coded graphs. According to data in Warrior Forum, 52 shops that use this tool generated just over $1.6 million in sales from repeat customers as a direct result. RetentionGrid also has a great knowledge base and provides custom suggestions on how to best reach the different segments and reach your audience.

5.  Crazy Egg

crazy egg analytics

Crazy Egg is an easy-to-use tool that offers some in-depth and user-friendly graphs. Actually, it allows you to look on your website with the eyes of your real users! Sounds like a magic? Crazy Egg provides visual heat maps, which can be used to examine which areas visitors are clicking on and which they are simply ignoring.

Here is a short overview of major features:

  1. Heatmaps that show you the elements on your site that are and aren’t performing well.
  2. Scrollmaps to see how far down a page users are scrolling and which content never gets seen.
  3. Screenshots to show you how your website looks across a variety of different devices.
  4. Clickmap called confetti that enables you to visualise clicks by segments – device, new/returning visitors, campaigns and other metrics.

However, there are some drawbacks that some experienced users point out:

  1. No automation – if you want to run a set of heatmaps regularly to keep track of frequently changing content, this needs to be done manually.
  2. No integrations with A/B testing tools, which indeed, would be very helpful.
  3. Not helpful customer support.

All things considered, this tool offers a great variety of visualisation tools for a moderate price.

Wrap up

While choosing a tool for analytics tracking, don’t rely solely on “popular names” and reviews. Things like ease of use, setup time/cost, the type of data it offers and how it meets your business needs is what really matters. A lot of these things are subjective to you and your company so you need to spend the time understanding the tool.

Remember that tools are only useful if they help you improve your eCommerce store. The only way to figure this last step is by actually using them.