eCommerce reporting.
When working with eCommerce businesses, it is clear that many spend most of a Monday morning generating reports and most of the afternoon talking about them. Generating the reports can be so time-consuming that you go through the motions and have the same weekly conversations about performance. In addition, you often need more time to analyse the data and create meaningful outputs that will positively impact your business.
Whether you operate a lean digital marketing team or have abundant resources, it is crucial that you have data to hand in a fast-paced environment. In addition, it must not become a distraction that prevents action.
In two recent articles, we discussed the benefits of GA4 for eCommerce businesses and the misconceptions about switching to GA4. However, the benefits become more evident as we spend more time working with our clients.
GA4 is user- and event-based and allows tracking multiple touch points along the way using the data-driven attribution model. This tracking and attribution give companies much deeper insight into consumer behaviour around the product or services.
As we continue to support our clients by making reporting more efficient, we decided to share our thinking to help you reduce the time you spend generating and reviewing reports.
A typical reporting pulse.
So how might a typical pulse look?
In eCommerce, we recommend that businesses circulate top-line reports daily and, at minimum, include sessions, transactions, revenue and conversion rate. Simply put, this lets you understand if your sales, marketing and branding activity directly impacts your traffic. So, for example, if you launched a new social campaign with a new product that didn’t lead to a spike in traffic, you could review your marketing plan.
It also allows you to see any improvements in conversion and what is driving them, as well as understand if your revenue per transaction has been affected.
You can make immediate short-term decisions directly affecting your revenue and profitability by getting these reports daily without losing too much time in the decision-making process.
Also, you’ll want to think about breaking down the daily KPIs into specific channels weekly. It is also advantageous to use the native data that GA4 provides rather than exporting it into excel documents or similar. Finally, when producing these reports, you should compare the figures against the previous weeks and the same week during the last year.
Monthly reporting.
Each month, you should export a full reporting pack. This pack should continue to look at transactions, revenue and conversion rate but should now break this down per campaign. At this stage, it is also essential to look at subscriber growth and new user acquisition. These reports give you insight into your overall audience net movement. In addition, reviewing average transactions per user in the period and average order value can help you get a picture of your customers purchasing habits and see if the activity is driving increased spend.
At this stage, providing more insight into products with high-view / low conversion & low view high conversion as well as add to basket rate, basket-to-order rate and coupon usage. These reports will give you a more granular idea of your products, how you view them and ultimately, if and how your customers purchase them. This knowledge could guide you to make subtle changes on your website or landing page to improve the conversion of your products.
In addition to your reports, could you consider exploring GA4 audiences alongside your reports? For example, the audience reports could include a mix of previous purchases, non-purchases and first-time visitors.
In summary, this is only a partial list of the reports available in GA4. However, it is a starting point to guide eCommerce companies on streamlining reporting to increase efficiency. Whilst GA4 has many other reports that may be valuable to the organisation, it is only easy to know what reports are valid with a thorough understanding of the business.
Let us help with the setup.
If you’re struggling to create the correct reporting structure for your eCommerce business, our Data and Insights team is available to help. Also, if you want to learn more about our work for clients like La Perla, Citizen Watches and Cotton Traders, email our team at info@thephagroup.com.
