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The Importance of Website Analytics

One way to get insights on your online store visitors is the implementation of Website Analytics. If you are running an online store without analytics, then you are basically blind and you will have no idea what’s going on with your website.

With the right tools, you can keep track of your customers, visiting prospects, their interests, and much more.

Web Traffic Categories

Your web traffic is divided into 4 categories:

  1. Search – Traffic that comes from search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
  2. Referral – Traffic that comes directly from a link on a different website.
  3. Campaign – Traffic that has been tagged by the marketer. It could be email, Social Media, etc.
  4. Direct – Traffic which doesn’t have a known source.

Measurement and Analysis

Any data you collect must be measured and analyzed. This will help in feeding the user with the right information which can be converted to actionable insights over time.

Shoppers’ Journey

Your main revenue drivers are your shoppers. What’s more important to them on your site is the user experience. With web analytics, you can track a shopper’s journey, understand their behavior, analyze them, and feed them with the right product.

Here’s the shoppers’ journey and the metrics that correspond to each step of the journey:

  • Awareness – Brand Impressions
  • Interest – Clicks
  • Consideration – Customer Database Records
  • Purchase – Conversion
  • Retention – Lifetime Value
  • Advocacy – Referrals

Awareness

To understand your shopper journey better, it’s important to collect enough data.

Users’ Shopping Behavior

With analytics, you get a complete view of the users’ shopping behavior on your online store. Analytics provide you with all the data, such as how many people visit your online store daily, how many people make purchases, and how many left just before the transaction. Collect information such as traffic source, location, most popular products, high selling, and low selling.

Analyzing Shopping Behaviors

Once you gather enough information on users’ behavior, you need to slice and dice the data in a way that is readable by pretty much everyone. This will help different teams understand where there is enough improvement, what needs changes, and what needs modification. The responsible teams can take necessary actions.

Keep an Eye on Marketing Efforts

It’s very important to tag all your marketing campaigns to understand their performance better. It’s a good practice to manually tag your marketing campaigns.

Let’s say you publish two posts to any of the social media platforms. One is a regular post about your company, and the second is a special post announcing a new promotion. If you aren’t manually tagging these links, then all the traffic from both posts will appear as referral traffic with the respective social media being the referrer. It would be more useful to tag each of these posts as different campaigns.

Rakam’s Position

Rakam is a fully customizable open-source platform. One of the major problems companies face with tools like Google Analytics, Mixpanel, and others is that you will not have control over user data.

Rakam allows you to write SQL code for your custom reports. It supports ANSI-SQL 2011 standard so you have access to CTEs, WINDOW functions, and many other analytics features in SQL.

Reports

Counts of Events by Day

E-commerce Dashboard

Funnel Reports

Event tracking is a must for any online store. With our web, iOS, and Android JavaScript tracker, you are good to go.

Of course, Google Analytics has some great features, but without control over your data, you may still be going blind. Here's a full comparison for Google Analytics vs Rakam .

Go ahead, give it a spin and see for yourself .