Top tips to measure the impact of your ecommerce marketing

A common question I hear from business owners is ‘What part of my marketing is actually driving ecommerce sales?’  closely followed by ‘What activities should I invest more/less in to drive my ecommerce business objectives?’ With so many channels and approaches available and a continuous stream of digital marketing businesses promoting the latest solutions to you, it can be challenging to know which way to turn.

One of my favourite business mantra’s is ‘If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it!’  And so it goes when it comes to driving the performance of your Food or Drink ecommerce activities.  Establish consistent and insightful ways to measure your performance and you start to hone a competitive advantage.  The good news is that even if you’re a small startup with minimal digital expertise, there are a number of free, low cost and integrated ecommerce tools available that can help you track your performance.  Whether you’re looking to interrogate your digital agency’s performance or you want to find ways to better manage your performance in-house, here are some commonly used approaches and tools to check out.

E-commerce platform analytics

All the popular ecommerce platforms such as Shopify and Squarespace include  built in Analytics reports which will provide you with an overview of website visitor and customer actions that have been prompted by your marketing activities.  You’ll find reports detailing the sources of website clickthrough’s from Google searches and email campaigns to visits from social media and referral websites.  You can also track the value of sales and average order value generated from different marketing channel referrals to better understand where your most valuable customers are coming from.  

Google Analytics 4

By integrating your website with a free Google Analytics 4 account, you create the opportunity to take a deeper dive into your customer’s marketing interactions. Once setup you can use GA4s Advertising Conversion Paths report to view the number and type of online actions customers predominantly went through before making a purchase.  Previously to this latest version of Google Analytics, it was only possible to see the final customer action that triggered a purchase visit.  With the recently released Conversion Paths report you can now establish an increasingly detailed view of the impact of adverts, emails and referral sites in advance of a final purchase visit.  As an example in a recent report I ran for a client, around 50% of customer sales resulted from direct visits, whilst another 50% made multiple interactions via organic search, coupon sites, review sites, email campaigns and social media before they came back to make a final purchase.  Some of these advance purchase journey’s stretched days or even weeks.  These insights can help you to get a clearer view of your customer behaviour over time and build confidence in your marketing spend decisions.

Benchmark Performance Tracking

Benchmarking your digital marketing performance against your industry sector is also a useful way to get a more realistic view of how you perform against your competitors.  For example, email marketing platforms such as Mailchimp automatically provide insights benchmarked against other businesses in your sector which can help you to better gauge your performance in the marketplace.  For example, they indicate how well you are doing on email open rates, click throughs and unsubscribes. Squarespace and Shopify also provide helpful pointers in some reports as to how you are performing against other ecommerce vendors.  As an example, Squarespace cites the industry average for abandoned carts in its analytics report which you can use to benchmark your abandoned cart rate against.

E-Store Customer Survey

What can you do if you want to gather data about your marketing performance both on and offline? Statistics indicate that the best time to ask a question of your online customer is just after they have completed a transaction.  With this in mind,  look at placing a simple multi-choice question on your closing transaction page, asking how your customer first found out about your brand.  This list can then include everything from digital channels, to events, word of mouth, media and more and will provide you with more useful performance insights.

Digital Advertising Analytics

If you are using display or pay-per-click adverts on search engines or social media platforms, you are also provided with extensive data via their performance reports e.g. views, click throughs, purchase events and multiples of revenue generated from your advertising spend.   When setting up your ad campaigns, make sure to use a short, unique and recognisable name to help you assess and compare the effectiveness of each campaign over time.

Bringing it all together

All of the above data is useful, but can quickly become less impactful if you don’t use it to build a bigger picture.  To help you to better monitor progress over time and to obtain that useful helicopter view,  I recommending porting your most important performance indicators into a summary spreadsheet on a regular basis.  That might be once a month, or once a week dependent on how big an operation you are. With a one page view of your performance across all your digital marketing activities, you are better placed to make the informed decisions that will support your marketing success.

If you’re looking for further support with your marketing performance management setup, please feel free to get in touch for a no obligation chat about your requirements.