Announcing our new integration with Littledata! Below is a guest post by Littledata’s Ari Messer shedding some insight into how accurate analytics are essential to driving ecommerce growth and how Refersion merchants will benefit from this new partnership.
Growth doesn’t happen by accident. The most successful companies build extensive online networks and hone every aspect of their websites — marketing channels, messaging, UX, product offerings — using smart analytics. But how do you know if you’re getting accurate data, and how do you sort through all that data without losing your mind?
Ecommerce is accelerating at unprecedented rates, but there’s also more competition than ever before. The National Retail Federation (NRF) expects total retail sales in the US to grow around 4% this year, but guess what? They expect online retail to grow up to three times as fast, at 8–12%. And mobile ecommerce is growing even faster!
Without accurate data, marketing ROI can seem like something only available to corporate megaliths. So how do you know if you’re growing your affiliate network in the right direction? And how do you drill down into user behaviour for more effective targeting, such as selling to the mobile users that are most likely to convert? The answer lies in analytics.
Analytics can sound like a scary word, but it doesn’t have to be. We built Littledata to make it easy for any ecommerce business to get accurate data and actionable insights.
Here’s how to get there in three easy steps.
Fix your analytics
Once you’ve set up Google Analytics with your Refersion account so you can track affiliate traffic, you’ll need a way to know that you’re getting reliable data for each marketing channel. And you’ll want to be sure that you’re not making common Google Analytics setup mistakes, like tracking one person as if they were multiple users, or not attributing marketing campaigns to sales.
Littledata’s audit tool is the easiest way to check if you have Google Analytics set up correctly. It’s an automated audit checklist that you can run as often as you’d like. Our Shopify reporting app’s audit tool even fixes a lot of the setup issues automatically, with just a click.
But if you have complex setup issues, it’s a good idea to consult with a Google Analytics-certified consultant before making any major changes to your tracking. Use the audit tool to find out what’s wrong, then talk to a professional. Sometimes trying to fix it yourself can lead to duplicate scripts and other issues.
Segment marketing channels and connect them with user behavior
Let me tell you a secret: you aren’t going to see real growth by only paying attention to marketing data. Don’t get me wrong, marketing is important — in fact, it’s so important that you should be connecting your marketing channels with visitor behaviour on your site, especially the sales process and repeat buying behaviour.
Set up custom events in Google Analytics to capture detail specific actions that will help you improve your customer targeting. For example, you can use custom events to find out if your affiliate traffic often hovers over a particular ‘Buy Now’ button but doesn’t click it. Changing that button placement or design could have a huge effect on revenue.
PRO tip: Want to track checkout steps on your site? Try Enhanced Ecommerce and Google Tag Manager (GTM)
Automate reporting and act on the results
Now that you have the right analytics setup, it’s time to take action. Here are some tips:
- You don’t have to check your analytics every day, but you should at least be checking reports weekly. Sure, you could build and update these by hand in Excel, but that’s a laborious process. Use a smart, single dashboard and automated reports that make sense of the data for you, so you can make profitable decisions instead of just thinking about them.
2. Improve your affiliate spend with multi-channel marketing attribution and buyer personas. For example, buyer personas will show if desktop or mobile users are more likely to convert in your Refersion affiliate traffic, and which location is giving you a higher ecommerce conversion rate. This is especially useful with a private affiliate network like Refersion, where you have complete control.
3. Surpass the competition by benchmarking your online sales and marketing performance against top sites in your industry. Is that a decent bounce rate? Find out for sure with ecommerce benchmarks.
Littledata integration with Refersion
If you’re looking to make data-driven decisions, Littledata’s analytics app and Refersion’s affiliate platform are a match made in heaven. Used together, they’re a supercharged toolbox for ecommerce entrepreneurs. The integration makes it easy to optimize every marketing channel — starting with affiliate referrals and extending to email campaigns, PPC campaigns, social campaigns and beyond — and attribute this marketing data to shopping activities, such as responses to incentives and repeat buying behavior.
Littledata-Refersion integration is optimized for Shopify users, but will work with any ecommerce platform that you’re already using with Refersion. Littledata works on top of Google Analytics, so you’ll need to get that set up too if you haven’t already.
If you have any questions, drop us a line anytime. We’re always happy to chat about how to harness the power of analytics!
