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How to Implement Cross-Channel Analytics : A Guide for Marketers
17 avril, par ErinEvery modern marketer knows they have to connect with consumers across several channels. But do you know how well Instagram works alongside organic traffic or your email list? Are you even tracking the impacts of these channels in one place?
You need a cross-channel analytics solution if you answered no to either of these questions.
In this article, we’ll explain cross-channel analytics, why your company probably needs it and how to set up a cross-channel analytics solution as quickly and easily as possible.
What is cross-channel analytics?
Cross-channel analytics is a form of marketing analytics that collects and analyses data from every channel and campaign you use.
The result is a comprehensive view of your customer’s journey and each channel’s role in converting customers.
Cross-channel analytics lets you track every channel you use to convert customers, including:
- Your website
- Social media profiles
- Paid search
- E-commerce
- Retargeting campaigns
Cross-channel analytics solves one of the most significant issues of cross-channel or multi-channel marketing efforts: measurement.
Research shows that only 16% of marketing tech stacks allow for accurate measurement of multi-channel initiatives across channels.
That’s a problem, given the staggering number of touchpoints in a typical buyer’s conversion path. However, it can be fixed using a cross-channel analytics approach that lets you measure the performance of every channel and assign a dollar value to its role in every conversion.
The difference between cross-channel analytics and multi-channel analytics
Cross-channel analytics and multi-channel analytics sound very similar, but there’s one key difference you need to know. Multi-channel analytics measures the performance of several channels, but not necessarily all of them, nor the extent to which they work together to drive conversions. Conversely, cross-channel analytics measures the performance of all your marketing channels and how they work together.
What are the benefits of cross-channel analytics
Cross-channel analytics offers a lot of marketing and business benefits. Here are the ones marketing managers love most.
Get a complete view of the customer journey
Implementing a cross-channel analytics solution is the only way to get a complete view of your customer journey.
Cross-channel marketing analytics lets you see your customer journey in high definition, allowing you to build comprehensive customer profiles using data from multiple sources across every touchpoint.
The result? You get to understand how every customer behaves at every point of the customer journey, why they convert or leave your funnel, and which channels play the biggest role.
In short, you get to see why customers convert so you can learn how to convert more of them.
Personalise the customer experience
According to a McKinsey study, customers demand personalisation, and brands that excel at it generate 40% more revenue. Deliver the personalisation they desire and reap the benefits with cross-channel analytics.
When you understand the customer journey in detail, it becomes much easier to personalise your website and marketing efforts to their preferences and behaviours.
Identify your most effective marketing channels
Cross-channel marketing helps you understand your marketing efforts to see how every channel impacts conversions.
Take a look at the screenshot from Matomo below. Cross-channel analytics lets you get incredibly granular — we can see the number of conversions of organic search drives and the performance of individual search engines.
This makes it easy to identify your most effective marketing channels and allocate your resources appropriately. It also allows you to ask (and answer) which channels are the most effective.
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Attribute conversions accurately
An attribution model decides how you assign credit for each customer conversion to different touchpoints on the customer journey. Without a cross-channel analytics solution, you’re stuck using a standard attribution model like first or last click.
These models will show you how customers first found your brand or which channel finally convinced them to convert, but it doesn’t help you understand the role all your channels played in the conversion.
Cross-channel analytics solves this attribution problem. Rather than attributing a conversion to the touchpoint that directly led to the sale, cross-channel data gives you the real picture and allows you to use multi-touch attribution to understand which touchpoints generate the most revenue.
How to set up cross-channel analytics
Now that you know what cross-channel analytics is and why you should use it, here’s how to set up your solution.
Determine your objectives
Defining your marketing goals will help you build a more relevant and actionable cross-channel analytics solution.
If you want to improve marketing attribution, for example, you can choose a platform with that feature built-in. If you care about personalisation, you could choose a platform with A/B testing capabilities to measure the impact of your personalisation efforts.
Set relevant KPIs
You’ll want to track relevant KPIs to measure the marketing effectiveness of each channel. Put top-of-the-funnel metrics aside and focus on conversion metrics.
These include:
- Conversion rate
- Average visit duration
- Bounce rate
Implement tracking and analytics tools
Gathering customer data from every channel and centralising it in a single location is one of the biggest challenges of cross-channel analytics. Still, it’s made easier with the right tracking tool or analytics platform.
The trick is to choose a platform that lets you measure as many of your channels as possible in a single platform. With Matomo, for example, you can track search, paid search, social and email campaigns and your website analytics.
Set up a multi-touch attribution model
Now that you have all of your data in one place, you can set up a multi-touch attribution model that lets you understand the extent to which each marketing channel contributes to your overall success.
There are several attribution models to choose from, including:
Each model has benefits and drawbacks, so choosing the right model for your organisation can be tricky. Rather than take a wild guess, evaluate each model against your marketing objectives, sales length cycle and data availability.
For example, if you want to focus on optimising customer acquisition costs, a model that prioritises earlier touchpoints will be better. If you care about conversions, you might try a time decay model.
Turn data into insights with reports
One of the big benefits of choosing a tool like Matomo, which consolidates data in one place, is that it significantly speeds up and simplifies reporting.
When all the data is stored in one platform, you don’t need to spend hours combing through your social media platforms and copying and pasting analytics data into a spreadsheet. It’s all there and ready for you to run reports.
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Get the web insights you need, without compromising data accuracy.
Take action
There’s no point implementing a cross-channel analytics system if you aren’t going to take action.
But where should you start?
Optimising your budgets and prioritising marketing spend is a great starting point. Use your cross-channel insights to find your most effective marketing channels (they’re the ones that convert the most customers or have the highest ROI) and allocate more of your budget to them.
You can also optimise the channels that aren’t pulling their weight if social media is letting you down; for example, experiment with tactics like social commerce that could drive more conversions. Alternatively, you could choose to stop investing entirely in these channels.
Cross-channel analytics best practices
If you already have a cross-channel analytics solution, take things to the next level with the following best practices.
Use a centralised solution to track everything
Centralising your data in one analytics tool can streamline your marketing efforts and help you stay on top of your data. It won’t just save you from tabbing between different browsers or copying and pasting everything into a spreadsheet, but it can also make it easier to create reports.
Think about consumer privacy
If you are looking at a new cross-channel analytics tool, consider how it accounts for data privacy regulations in your area.
You’re going to be collecting a lot of data, so it’s important to respect their privacy wishes.
It’s best to choose a platform like Matomo that complies with the strictest privacy laws (CCPA, GDPR, etc.).
Monitor data in real time
So, you’ve got a holistic view of your marketing efforts by integrating all your channels into a single tool?
Great, now go further by monitoring the impact of your marketing efforts in real time.
With a web analytics platform like Matomo, you can see who visits your site, what they do, and where they come from through features like the visits log report, which even lets you view individual user sessions. This lets you measure the impact of posting on a particular social channel or launching a new offer.
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Get the web insights you need, without compromising data accuracy.
Reallocate marketing budgets based on performance
When you track every channel, you can use a multi-touch attribution model like position-based or time-decay to give every channel the credit it deserves. But don’t just credit each channel; turn your valuable insights into action.
Use cross-channel attribution analytics data to reallocate your marketing budget to the most profitable channels or spend time optimising the channels that aren’t pulling their weight.
Cross-channel analytics platforms to get started with
The marketing analytics market is huge. Mordor Intelligence valued it at $6.31 billion in 2024 and expects it to reach $11.54 billion by 2029. Many of these platforms offer cross-channel analytics, but few can track the impact of multiple marketing channels in one place.
So, rather than force you to trawl through confusing product pages, we’ve shortlisted three of the best cross-channel analytics solutions.
Matomo
Matomo is a web analytics platform that lets you collect and centralise your marketing data while giving you 100% accurate data. That includes search, social, e-commerce, campaign tracking data and comprehensive website analytics.
Better still, you get the necessary tools to turn those insights into action. Custom reporting lets you track and visualise the metrics that matter, while conversion optimisation tools like built-in A/B testing, heatmaps, session recordings and more let you test your theories.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the most popular and widely used tool on the market. The level of analysis and customisation you can do with it is impressive for a free tool. That includes tracking just about any event and creating reports from scratch.
Google Analytics provides some cross-channel marketing features and lets you track the impact of various channels, such as social and search, but there are a couple of drawbacks.
Privacy can be a concern because Google Analytics collects data from your customers for its own remarketing purposes.
It also uses data sampling to generate wider insights from a small subset of your data. This lack of accurate data reporting can cause you to generate false insights.
With Google Analytics, you’ll also need to subscribe to additional tools to gain advanced insights into the user experience. So, consider that while this tool is free, you’ll need to pay for heatmaps, session recording and A/B testing tools to optimise effectively.
Improvado
Improvado is an analytics tool for sales and marketing teams that extracts thousands of metrics from hundreds of sources. It centralises data in data warehouses, from which you can create a range of marketing dashboards.
While Improvado does have analytics capabilities, it is primarily an ETL (extraction, transform, load) tool for organisations that want to centralise all their data. That means marketers who aren’t familiar with data transformations may struggle to get their heads around the complexity of the platform.
Make the most of cross-channel analytics with Matomo
Cross-channel analytics is the only way to get a comprehensive view of your customer journey and understand how your channels work together to drive conversions.
Then you’re dealing with so many channels and data; keeping things as simple as possible is the key to success. That’s why over 1 million websites choose Matomo.
Our all-in-one analytics solution measures traditional web analytics, behavioural analytics, attribution and SEO, so you have 100% accurate data in one place.
Try it free for 21 days. No credit card required.
Try Matomo for Free
21 day free trial. No credit card required.
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Clickstream Data : Definition, Use Cases, and More
15 avril, par ErinGaining a deeper understanding of user behaviour — customers’ different paths, digital footprints, and engagement patterns — is crucial for providing a personalised experience and making informed marketing decisions.
In that sense, clickstream data, or a comprehensive record of a user’s online activities, is one of the most valuable sources of actionable insights into users’ behavioural patterns.
This article will cover everything marketing teams need to know about clickstream data, from the basic definition and examples to benefits, use cases, and best practices.
What is clickstream data?
As a form of web analytics, clickstream data focuses on tracking and analysing a user’s online activity. These digital breadcrumbs offer insights into the websites the user has visited, the pages they viewed, how much time they spent on a page, and where they went next.
Your clickstream pipeline can be viewed as a “roadmap” that can help you recognise consistent patterns in how users navigate your website.
With that said, you won’t be able to learn much by analysing clickstream data collected from one user’s session. However, a proper analysis of large clickstream datasets can provide a wealth of information about consumers’ online behaviours and trends — which marketing teams can use to make informed decisions and optimise their digital marketing strategy.
Clickstream data collection can serve numerous purposes, but the main goal remains the same — gaining valuable insights into visitors’ behaviours and online activities to deliver a better user experience and improve conversion likelihood.
Depending on the specific events you’re tracking, clickstream data can reveal the following:
- How visitors reach your website
- The terms they type into the search engine
- The first page they land on
- The most popular pages and sections of your website
- The amount of time they spend on a page
- Which elements of the page they interact with, and in what sequence
- The click path they take
- When they convert, cancel, or abandon their cart
- Where the user goes once they leave your website
As you can tell, once you start collecting this type of data, you’ll learn quite a bit about the user’s online journey and the different ways they engage with your website — all without including any personal details about your visitors.
Types of clickstream data
While all clickstream data keeps a record of the interactions that occur while the user is navigating a website or a mobile application — or any other digital platform — it can be divided into two types:
- Aggregated (web traffic) data provides comprehensive insights into the total number of visits and user interactions on a digital platform — such as your website — within a given timeframe
- Unaggregated data is broken up into smaller segments, focusing on an individual user’s online behaviour and website interactions
One thing to remember is that to gain valuable insights into user behaviour and uncover sequential patterns, you need a powerful tool and access to full clickstream datasets. Matomo’s Event Tracking can provide a comprehensive view of user interactions on your website or mobile app — everything from clicking a button and completing a form to adding (or removing) products from their cart.
On that note, based on the specific events you’re tracking when a user visits your website, clickstream data can include:
- Web navigation data: referring URL, visited pages, click path, and exit page
- User interaction data: mouse movements, click rate, scroll depth, and button clicks
- Conversion data: form submissions, sign-ups, and transactions
- Temporal data: page load time, timestamps, and the date and time of day of the user’s last login
- Session data: duration, start, and end times and number of pages viewed per session
- Error data: 404 errors and network or server response issues
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Clickstream data benefits and use cases
Given the actionable insights that clickstream data collection provides, it can serve a wide range of use cases — from identifying behavioural patterns and trends and examining competitors’ performance to helping marketing teams map out customer journeys and improve ROI.
According to the global Clickstream Analytics Market Report 2024, some key applications of clickstream analytics include click-path optimisation, website and app optimisation, customer analysis, basket analysis, personalisation, and traffic analysis.
The behavioural patterns and user preferences revealed by clickstream analytics data can have many applications — we’ve outlined the prominent use cases below.
Customer journey mapping
Clickstream data allows you to analyse the e-commerce customer’s online journey and provides insights into how they navigate your website. With such a comprehensive view of their click path, it becomes easier to understand user behaviour at each stage — from initial awareness to conversion — identify the most effective touchpoints and fine-tune that journey to improve their conversion likelihood.
Identifying customer trends
Clickstream data analytics can also help you identify trends and behavioural patterns — the most common sequences and similarities in how users reached your website and interacted with it — especially when you can access data from many website visitors.
Think about it — there are many ways in which you can use these insights into the sequence of clicks and interactions and recurring patterns to your team’s advantage.
Here’s an example:
It can reveal that some pieces of content and CTAs are performing well in encouraging visitors to take action — which shows how you should optimise other pages and what you should strive to create in the future, too.
Preventing site abandonment
Cart abandonment remains a serious issue for online retailers:
According to a recent report, the global cart abandonment rate in the fourth quarter of 2023 was at 83%.
That means that roughly eight out of ten e-commerce customers will abandon their shopping carts — most commonly due to additional costs, slow website loading times and the requirement to create an account before purchasing.
In addition to cart abandonment predictions, clickstream data analytics can reveal the pages where most visitors tend to leave your website. These drop-off points are clear indicators that something’s not working as it should — and once you can pinpoint them, you’ll be able to address the issue and increase conversion likelihood.
Improving marketing campaign ROI
As previously mentioned, clickstream data analysis provides insights into the customer journey. Still, you may not realise that you can also use this data to keep track of your marketing effectiveness.
Global digital ad spending continues to grow — and is expected to reach $836 billion by 2026. It’s easy to see why relying on accurate data is crucial when deciding which marketing channels to invest in.
You want to ensure you’re allocating your digital marketing and advertising budget to the channels — be it SEO, pay-per-click (PPC) ads, or social media campaigns — that impact driving conversions.
When you combine clickstream e-commerce data with conversion rates, you’ll find the latter in Matomo’s goal reports and have a solid, data-driven foundation for making better marketing decisions.
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Delivering a better user experience (UX)
Clickstream data analysis allows you to identify specific “pain points” — areas of the website that are difficult to use and may cause customer frustration.
It’s clear how this would be beneficial to your business:
Once you’ve identified these pain points, you can make the necessary changes to your website’s layout and address any technical issues that users might face, improving usability and delivering a smoother experience to potential customers.
Collecting clickstream data: Tools and legal implications
Your team will need a powerful tool capable of handling clickstream analytics to reap the benefits we’ve discussed previously. But at the same time, you need to respect users’ online privacy throughout clickstream data collection.
Generally speaking, there are two ways to collect data about users’ online activity — web analytics tools and server log files.
Web analytics tools are the more commonly used solution. Specifically designed to collect and analyse website data, these tools rely on JavaScript tags that run in the browser, providing actionable insights about user behaviour. Server log files can be a gold mine of data, too — but that data is raw and unfiltered, making it much more challenging to interpret and analyse.
That brings us to one of the major clickstream challenges to keep in mind as you move forward — compliance.
While Google remains a dominant player in the web analytics market, there’s one area where Matomo has a significant advantage — user privacy.
Matomo operates according to privacy laws — including the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), making it an ethical alternative to Google Analytics.
It should go without saying, but compliance with data privacy laws — the most talked-about one being the GDPR framework introduced by the EU — isn’t something you can afford to overlook.
The GDPR was first implemented in the EU in 2018. Since then, several fines have been issued for non-compliance — including the record fine of €1.2 billion that Meta Platforms, Inc. received in 2023 for transferring personal data of EU-based users to the US.
Clickstream analytics data best practices
As valuable as it might be, processing large amounts of clickstream analytics data can be a complex — and, at times, overwhelming — process.
Here are some best practices to keep in mind when it comes to clickstream analysis:
Define your goals
It’s essential to take the time to define your goals and objectives.
Once you have a clear idea of what you want to learn from a given clickstream dataset and the outcomes you hope to see, it’ll be easier to narrow down your scope — rather than trying to tackle everything at once — before moving further down the clickstream pipeline.
Here are a few examples of goals and objectives you can set for clickstream analysis:
- Understanding and predicting users’ behavioural patterns
- Optimising marketing campaigns and ROI
- Attributing conversions to specific marketing touchpoints and channels
Analyse your data
Collecting clickstream analytics data is only part of the equation; what you do with raw data and how you analyse it matters. You can have the most comprehensive dataset at your disposal — but it’ll be practically worthless if you don’t have the skill set to analyse and interpret it.
In short, this is the stage of your clickstream pipeline where you uncover common sequences and consistent patterns in user behaviour.
Clickstream data analytics can extract actionable insights from large datasets using various approaches, models, and techniques.
Here are a few examples:
- If you’re working with clickstream e-commerce data, you should perform funnel or conversion analyses to track conversion rates as users move through your sales funnel.
- If you want to group and analyse users based on shared characteristics, you can use Matomo for cohort analysis.
- If your goal is to predict future trends and outcomes — conversion and cart abandonment prediction, for example — based on available data, prioritise predictive analytics.
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Organise and visualise your data
As you reach the end of your clickstream pipeline, you need to start thinking about how you will present and communicate your data. And what better way to do that than to transform that data into easy-to-understand visualisations?
Here are a few examples of easily digestible formats that facilitate quick decision-making:
- User journey maps, which illustrate the exact sequence of interactions and user flow through your website
- Heatmaps, which serve as graphical — and typically colour-coded — representations of a website visitor’s activity
- Funnel analysis, which are broader at the top but get increasingly narrower towards the bottom as users flow through and drop off at different stages of the pipeline
Collect clickstream data with Matomo
Clickstream data is hard to beat when tracking the website visitor’s journey — from first to last interaction — and understanding user behaviour. By providing real-time insights, your clickstream pipeline can help you see the big picture, stay ahead of the curve and make informed decisions about your marketing efforts.
Matomo accurate data and compliance with GDPR and other data privacy regulations — it’s an all-in-one, ethical platform that can meet all your web analytics needs. That’s why over 1 million websites use Matomo for their web analytics.
Try Matomo free for 21 days. No credit card required.
Try Matomo for Free
21 day free trial. No credit card required.
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A Beginner’s Guide to Omnichannel Analytics
14 avril, par ErinLinear customer journeys are as obsolete as dial-up internet and floppy disks. As a marketing manager, you know better than anyone that customers interact with your brand hundreds of times across dozens of channels before purchasing. That can make tracking them a nightmare unless you build an omnichannel analytics solution.
Alas, if only it were that simple.
Unfortunately, it’s not enough to collect data on your customers’ complex journeys just by buying an omnichannel platform. You need to generate actionable insights by using marketing attribution to tie channels to conversions.
This article will explain how to build a useful omnichannel analytics solution that lets you understand and improve the customer journey.
What is omnichannel analytics?
Omnichannel analytics collects and analyses customer data from every touchpoint and device. The goal is to collect all this omnichannel data in one place, creating a single, real-time, unified view of your customer’s journey.
Unfortunately, most businesses haven’t achieved this yet. As Karen Lellouche Tordjman and Marco Bertini say:
“Despite all the buzz around the concept of omnichannel, most companies still view customer journeys as a linear sequence of standardised touchpoints within a given channel. But the future of customer engagement transforms touchpoints from nodes along a predefined distribution path to full-blown portals that can serve as points of sale or pathways to many other digital and virtual interactions. They link to chatbots, kiosks, robo-advisors, and other tools that customers — especially younger ones — want to engage with.”
However, doing so is more important than ever — especially when consumers have over 300 digital touchpoints, and the average number of touchpoints in the B2B buyer journey is 27.
Not only that, but customers expect personalised experiences across every platform — that’s the kind you can only create when you have access to omnichannel data.
What might omnichannel analytics look like in practice for an e-commerce store?
An online store would integrate data from channels like its website, mobile app, social media accounts, Google Ads and customer service records. This would show how customers find its brand, how they use each channel to interact with it and which channels convert the most customers.
This would allow the e-commerce store to tailor marketing channels to customers’ needs. For instance, they could focus social media use on product discovery and customer support. Google Ads campaigns could target the best-converting products. While all this is happening, the store could also ensure every channel looks the same and delivers the same experience.
What are the benefits of omnichannel analytics?
Why go to all the trouble of creating a comprehensive view of the customer’s experience? Because you stand to gain some pretty significant benefits when implementing omnichannel analytics.
Understand the customer journey
You want to understand how your customers behave, right? No other method will allow you to fully understand your customer journey the way omnichannel analytics does.
It doesn’t matter how customers engage with your brand — whether that’s your website, app, social media profiles or physical stores — omnichannel analytics capture every interaction.
With this 360-degree view of your customers, it’s easy to understand how they move between channels, where they encounter issues and what bottlenecks prevent them from converting.
Deliver better personalisation
We don’t have to tell you that personalisation matters. But do you know just how important it is? Since 56% of customers will become repeat buyers after a personalised experience, delivering them as often as possible is critical.
Omnichannel analytics helps in your quest for personalisation by highlighting the individual preferences of customer segments. For example, e-commerce stores can use omnichannel analytics to understand how shoppers behave across different devices and tailor their offers accordingly.
Upgrade the customer experience
Omnichannel analytics gives you the insights to improve every aspect of the customer experience.
For starters, you can ensure a consistent brand experience across all your top channels by making sure they look and behave the same.
Then, you can use omnichannel insights to tailor each channel to your customers’ requirements. For example, most people interacting with your brand on social media may seek support. Knowing that you can create dedicated support accounts to assist users.
Improve marketing campaigns
Which marketing campaigns or traffic sources convert the most customers? How can you improve these campaigns? Omnichannel analytics has the answers.
When you implement omnichannel analytics you automatically track the performance of every marketing channel by attributing each conversion to one or more traffic sources. This lets you see whether Google Ads bring in more customers than your SEO efforts. Or whether social media ads are the most profitable acquisition channel.
Armed with this information, you can improve your marketing efforts — either by focusing on your profitable channels or rectifying problems that stop less profitable channels from converting.
What are the challenges of omnichannel analytics?
There are three challenges when implementing an omnichannel analytics solution:
- Complex customer journeys: Customer journeys aren’t linear and can be incredibly difficult to track.
- Regulatory and privacy issues: When you start gathering customer data, you quickly come up against consumer privacy laws.
- No underlying goal: There has to be a reason to go to all this effort, but brands don’t always have goals in mind before they start.
You can’t do anything about the first challenge.
After all, your customer journey will almost never be linear. And isn’t the point of implementing an omnichannel solution to understand these complex journeys in the first place? Once you set up omnichannel analytics, these journeys will be much easier to decipher.
As for the other two:
Using the right software that respects user privacy and complies with all major privacy laws will avoid regulatory issues. Take Matomo, for instance. Our software was designed with privacy in mind and is configured to follow the strictest privacy laws, such as GDPR.
Tying omnichannel analytics to marketing attribution will solve the final challenge by giving your omnichannel efforts a goal. When you tie omnichannel analytics to your marketing efforts, you aren’t just getting a 360-degree view of your customer journey for the sake of it. You are getting that view to improve your marketing efforts and increase sales.
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Get the web insights you need, without compromising data accuracy.
How to set up an omnichannel analytics solution
Want to set up a seamless analytical environment that incorporates data from every possible source? Follow these five steps:
Choose one or more analytics providers
You can use several tools to build an omnichannel analytics solution. These include web and app analytics tools, customer data platforms that centralise first-party data and business intelligence tools (typically used for visualisation).
Which tools you use will depend on your goals and your budget — the loftier your ambitions and the higher your budget, the more tools you can use.
Ideally, you should use as few tools as possible to capture your data. Most teams won’t need business intelligence platforms, for example. However, you may or may not need both an analytics platform and a customer data platform. Your decision will depend on how many channels your customers use and how well your analytics tool tracks everything.
If it can capture web and app usage while integrating with third-party platforms like your back-end e-commerce platform, then it’s probably enough.
Collect accurate data at every touchpoint
Your omnichannel analytics efforts hinge on the quantity and quality of data you can collect. You want to gather data from every touchpoint possible and store that data in as few places as possible. That’s why choosing as few tools as possible in the step above is so important.
So, where should you start? Common data sources include:
- Your website
- Apps (iOS and Android)
- Social media profiles
- ERPs
- PoS systems
At the same time, make sure you’re tracking all relevant metrics. Revenue, customer engagement and conversion-focused metrics like conversion rate, dwell time, cart abandonment rate and churn rate are particularly important.
Set up marketing attribution
Setting up marketing attribution (also known as multi-touch attribution) is essential to tie omnichannel data to business goals. It’s the only way to know exactly how valuable each marketing channel is and where each customer comes from.
You’ll want to use multi-touch attribution, given you have data from across the customer journey.
Multi-touch attribution models can include (but are not limited to):
- Linear: where each touchpoint is given equal weighting
- Time decay: where touchpoints are more valuable the nearer they are to conversion
- Position-based: where the first and last touch points are more valuable than all the others.
You don’t have to use just one of the models above, however. One of the benefits of using a web analytics tool like Matomo is that you can choose between different attribution models and compare them.
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Get the web insights you need, without compromising data accuracy.
Create reports that help you visualise data
Dashboards are your friend here. They’ll let you see KPIs at a glance, allowing you to keep track of day-to-day changes in your customer journey. Ideally, you’ll want a platform that lets you customise dashboard widgets so only relevant KPIs are shown.
Setting up standard and custom reports is also important. Custom reports allow you to choose metrics and dimensions that align with your goals. They will also allow you to present your data most meaningfully to your team, increasing the likelihood they act upon insights.
Analyse data and take action
Now that you have customer journey data at your fingertips, it’s time to analyse it. After all, there’s no point in implementing an omnichannel analytics solution if you aren’t going to take action.
If you’re unsure where to start, re-read the benefits we listed at the start of this article. You could use your omnichannel insights to improve your marketing campaigns by doubling down on the channels that bring in the best customers.
Or you could identify (and fix) bottlenecks in the customer journey so customers are less likely to fall out of your funnel between certain channels.
Just make sure you take action based on your data alone.
Make the most of omnichannel analytics with Matomo
A comprehensive web and app analytics platform is vital to any omnichannel analytics strategy.
But not just any solution will do. When privacy regulations impede an omnichannel analytics solution, you need a platform to capture accurate data without breaking privacy laws or your users’ trust.
That’s where Matomo comes in. Our privacy-friendly web analytics platform ensures accurate tracking of web traffic while keeping you compliant with even the strictest regulations. Moreover, our range of APIs and SDKs makes it easy to track interactions from all your digital products (website, apps, e-commerce back-ends, etc.) in one place.
Try Matomo for free for 21 days. No credit card required.
Try Matomo for Free
21 day free trial. No credit card required.
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7 Ecommerce Metrics to Track and Improve in 2024
12 avril, par ErinYou can invest hours into market research, create the best ads you’ve ever seen and fine-tune your budgets. But the only way to really know if your digital marketing campaigns move the needle is to track ecommerce metrics.
It’s time to put your hopes and gut feelings aside and focus on the data. Ecommerce metrics are key performance indicators that can tell you a lot about the performance of a single campaign, a traffic source or your entire marketing efforts.
That’s why it’s essential to understand what ecommerce metrics are, key metrics to track and how to improve them.
Ready to do all of the above? Then, let’s get started.
What are ecommerce metrics?
An ecommerce metric is any metric that helps you understand the effectiveness of your digital marketing efforts and the extent to which users are taking a desired action. Most ecommerce metrics focus on conversions, which could be anything from making a purchase to subscribing to your email list.
You need to track ecommerce metrics to understand how well your marketing efforts are working. They are essential to helping you run a cost-effective marketing campaign that delivers a return on investment.
For example, tracking ecommerce metrics will help you identify whether your digital marketing campaigns are generating a return on investment or whether they are actually losing money. They also help you identify your most effective campaigns and traffic sources.
Ecommerce metrics also help you spot opportunities for improvement both in terms of your marketing campaigns and your site’s UX.
For instance, you can use ecommerce metrics to track the impact on revenue of A/B tests on your marketing campaigns. Or you can use them to understand how users interact with your website and what, if anything, you can do to make it more engaging.
What’s the difference between conversion rate and conversion value?
The difference between a conversion rate and a conversion value is that the former is a percentage while the latter is a monetary value.
There can be confusion between the terms conversion rate and conversion value. Since conversions are core metrics in ecommerce, it’s worth taking a minute to clarify.
Conversion rates measure the percentage of people who take a desired action on your website compared to the total number of visitors. If you have 100 visitors and one of them converts, then your conversion rate is 1%.
Here’s the formula for calculating your conversion rate:
Conversion Rate (%) = (Number of conversions / Total number of visitors) × 100
Using the example above:
Conversion Rate = (1 / 100) × 100 = 1%
Conversion value is a monetary amount you assign to each conversion. In some cases, this is the price of the product a user purchases. In other conversion events, such as signing up for a free trial, you may wish to assign a hypothetical conversion value.
To calculate a hypothetical conversion value, let’s consider that you have estimated the average revenue generated from a paying customer is $300. If the conversion rate from free trial to paying customer is 20%, then the hypothetical conversion value for each free trial signup would be $300 multiplied by 20%, which equals $60. This takes into account the number of free trial users who eventually become paying customers.
So the formula for hypothetical conversion value looks like this:
Hypothetical conversion value = (Average revenue per paying customer) × (Conversion rate)
Using the values from our example:
Hypothetical conversion value = $300 × 20% = $60
The most important ecommerce metrics and how to track them
There are dozens of ecommerce metrics you could track, but here are seven of the most important.
Conversion rate
Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who take a desired action. It is arguably one of the most important ecommerce metrics and a great top-level indicator of the success of your marketing efforts.
You can measure the conversion rate of anything, including newsletter signups, ebook downloads, and product purchases, using the following formula:
Conversion rate = (Number of people who took action / Total number of visitors) × 100
You usually won’t have to manually calculate your conversion rate, though. Almost every web analytics or ad platform will track the conversion rate automatically.
Matomo, for instance, automatically tracks any conversion you set in the Goals report.
As you can see in the screenshot, your site’s conversions are plotted over a period of time and the conversion rate is tracked below the graph. You can change the time period to see how your conversion rate fluctuates.
If you want to go even further, track your new visitor conversion rate to see how engaging your site is to first-time visitors.
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Cost per acquisition
Cost per acquisition (CPA) is the average cost of acquiring a new user. You can calculate your overall CPA or you can break CPA down by email campaign, traffic source, or any other criteria.
Calculate CPA by dividing your total marketing cost by the number of new users you acquire.
CPA = Total marketing cost / Number of new users acquired
So if your Google Ads campaign costs €1,000 and you acquire 100 new users, your CPA is €10 (1000/100=10).
It’s important to note that CPA is not the same as customer acquisition cost. Customer acquisition cost considers the number of paying customers. CPA looks at the number of users taking a certain action, like subscribing to a newsletter, making a purchase, or signing up for a free trial.
Cost per acquisition is a direct measure of your marketing efforts’ effectiveness, especially when comparing CPA to average customer spend and return on ad spend.
If your CPA is higher than the average customer spend, your marketing campaign is profitable. If not, then you can look at ways to either increase customer spend or decrease your cost per acquisition.
Customer lifetime value
Customer lifetime value (CLV) is the average amount of money a customer will spend with your ecommerce brand over their lifetime.
Customer value is the total worth of a customer to your brand based on their purchasing behaviour. To calculate it, multiply the average purchase value by the average number of purchases. For instance, if the average purchase value is €50 and customers make 5 purchases on average, the customer value would be €250.
Use this formula to calculate customer value:
Customer value = Average purchase value × Average number of purchases
Then you can calculate customer lifetime value using the following formula:
CLV = Customer value × Average customer lifespan
In another example, let’s say you have a software company and customers pay you €500 per year for an annual subscription. If the average customer lifespan is 5 years, then the Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) would be €2,500.
Customer lifetime value = €500 × 5 = €2,500
Knowing how much potential customers are likely to spend helps you set accurate marketing budgets and optimise the price of your products.
Return on investment
Return on investment (ROI) is the amount of revenue your marketing efforts generate compared to total spend.
It’s usually calculated as a percentage using the following formula:
ROI = (Revenue / Total spend) × 100
If you spend €1,000 on a paid ad campaign and your efforts bring in €5,000, then your ROI is 500% (5,000/1,000 × 100).
With a web analytics tool like Matomo, you can quickly see the revenue generated from each traffic source and you can drill down further to compare different social media channels, search engines, referral websites and campaigns to get more granular view.
In the example above in Matomo’s Marketing Attribution feature, we can see that social networks are generating the highest amount of revenue in the year. To calculate ROI, we would need to compare the amount of investment to each channel.
Let’s say we invested $1,000 per year in search engine optimisation and content marketing, the return on investment (ROI) stands at approximately 2576%, based on a revenue of $26,763.48 per year.
Conversely, for organic social media campaigns, where $5,000 was invested and revenue amounted to $71,180.22 per year, the ROI is approximately 1323%.
Despite differences in revenue generation, both channels exhibit significant returns on investment, with SEO and content marketing demonstrating a much higher ROI compared to organic social media campaigns.
With that in mind, we might want to consider shifting our marketing budget to focus more on search engine optimisation and content marketing as it’s a greater return on investment.
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Return on ad spend
Return on ad spend (ROAS) is similar to return on investment, but it measures the profitability of a specific ad or campaign.
Calculate ROAS using the following formula:
ROAS = Revenue / Ad cost
A positive ROAS means you are making money. If you generate €3 for every €1 you spend on advertising, for example, there’s no reason to turn off that campaign. If you only make €1 for every €2 you spend, however, then you need to shut down the campaign or optimise it.
Bounce rate
Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave your site without taking another action. Calculate it using the following formula:
Bounce rate = (Number of visitors who bounce / Total number of visitors) × 100
Some portion of users will always leave your site immediately, but you should aim to make your bounce rate as low as possible. After all, every customer that bounces is a missed opportunity that you may never get again.
You can check the bounce rate for each one of your site’s pages using Matomo’s page analytics report. Web analytics tools like Google Analytics can track bounce rates for online stores also.
Bounce rate is calculated automatically. You can sort the list of pages by bounce rate allowing you to prioritise your optimisation efforts.
Don’t stop there, though. Explore bounce rate further by comparing your mobile bounce rate vs. desktop bounce rate by segmenting your traffic. This will highlight whether your mobile site needs improving.
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Click-through rate
Your clickthrough rate (CTR) tells you the number of people who click on your ads as a percentage of total impressions. You can calculate it by dividing the number of clicks your ad gets by the total number of times people see it.
So the formula looks like this:
CTR (%) = (Number of clicks / Total impressions) × 100
If an ad gets 1,000 impressions and 10 people click on it, then the CTR will be 10/1,000 × 100 = 1%
You don’t usually need to calculate your clickthrough rate manually, however. Most ad platforms like Google Ads will automatically calculate CTR.
What is considered a good ecommerce sales conversion rate?
This question is so broad it’s almost impossible to answer. The thing is, sales conversion rates vary massively depending on the conversion event and the industry. A good conversion rate in one industry might be terrible in another.
That being said, research shows that the average website conversion rate across all industries is 2.35%. Of course, some websites convert much better than this. The same study found that the top 25% of websites across all industries have a conversion rate of 5.31% or higher.
How can you improve your conversion rate?
Ecommerce metrics don’t just let you track your campaign’s ROI, they help you identify ways to improve your campaign.
Use these five tips to start improving your marketing campaign’s conversion rates today:
Run A/B tests
The most effective way to improve almost all of the ecommerce metrics you track is to test, test, and test again.
A/B testing or multivariate testing compares two different versions of the same content, such as a landing page or blog post. Seeing which version performs better can help you squeeze as many conversions as possible from your website and ad campaigns. But only if you test as many things as possible. This should include:
- Ad placement
- Ad copy
- CTAs
- Headlines
- Straplines
- Colours
- Design
To create and analyse tests and their results effectively, you’ll need either an A/B testing platform or a web analytics solution like Matomo, which offers one out of the box.
Matomo’s A/B Testing feature makes it easy to create and track tests over time, breaking down each test’s variations by the metrics that matter. It automatically calculates statistical significance, too, meaning you can be sure you’re making a change for the better.
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16 Website Metrics to Track If You Want to Grow Your Business
9 avril, par ErinConversion rate.
Bounce rate.
Sessions.
There are dozens of metrics to keep up with in web analytics. It can be confusing at times trying to keep up with everything.
But, if you want to improve your website performance and grow your business, you need to know what they are and how they work.
Why?
Because what you measure gets managed. This is true in your personal life and business. You must track various website metrics to help your business reach new heights.
In this guide, you’ll learn about the most important website metrics, why they’re important and how to track them to grow your brand.
What are website metrics?
Your website is your digital headquarters.
It’s not a static place. Instead, it’s a vibrant, interactive hub your visitors and customers can engage with daily.
Every time a user interacts with your website, you can track what’s happening.
Website metrics help you measure how much your visitors and customers interact with your website.
These engagement metrics help you understand what your visitors are doing, where they’re coming from, how they’re moving on your website and how long they stay. They can even give you insights into what their goals are.
If you aren’t tracking your website metrics, you won’t know how effective your website is.
By paying close attention to your key metrics within a web analytics platform like Matomo, you’ll be able to see how well your marketing is doing and how your visitors are engaging so you can improve the user experience and increase conversions.
16 website metrics to track
Here are the top 16 website metrics you need to be tracking if you want to grow your business:
1. Pageviews
A pageview is the number of times a web page has been viewed.
Many pageviews can indicate a successful search engine optimisation (SEO) or marketing campaign — it can be used to show positive results for these initiatives.
It can also help you determine various issues on individual pages. For instance, performance issues or poor website structure can cause visitors to get lost or confused while navigating your website.
2. Average time on page
Average time on a page is simply the time visitors spend on a specific page (not the entire website); tracking users’ time on various pages throughout your website can give you insights that can help you improve certain pages.
If you get tons of traffic to a particular page, but the average time a visitor stays on that page is minimal, the content may need some work.
Tracking this data can help determine if your website is engaging for your visitors or if you need to modify certain aspects to increase your visitors’ stay. Increasing the average time on the page will help boost your conversions and search engine rankings.
3. Actions per visit
Actions per visit is a key metric that tracks the average number of actions a visitor takes every time they visit your website. This data can help you track your audience engagement and the effectiveness of your content across your entire website.
An action is any activity performed by your visitors on your website like:
- Outlinks
- Downloads
- Page views
- Internal site searches
The higher your actions per visit, the more engaging your audience finds your website content. A side effect of increased actions is staying longer on the site and more likely to convert to your email list as a subscriber or pay for products as a customer.
4. Bounce rate
Like a bouncy ball, your website’s bounce rate measures how many users entered your site and “bounced” out without clicking on another page. This metric can be extremely helpful in determining user interest in your content.
You might be getting many visitors to your website, but if they “bounce” after visiting the first page they land on, that’s a great indicator that your content is not resonating with your audience.
Remember, this metric should be taken with a grain of salt.
Your bounce rate may indicate that visitors are finding the exact information that they wanted and leaving pleased, so it’s not a black-and-white metric.
For example, if you have a landing page with a high bounce rate, then that’s likely not a sign of a good user experience. But, if you have a knowledge base article and they just need to find some quick information, then it could be a good indicator.
5. Conversions
The first step in tracking conversions is defining what a conversion is for your website.
Do you want your audience to:
- View a blog post
- Purchase a product
- Download an eBook
- Sign up for a consultation call
Determine what that conversion is and track how often users take that action on your website.
This helps you understand if your marketing and content strategies are working toward your pre-defined conversion goal.
6. Conversion rate
A conversion rate is the percentage of visits that triggered a conversion. Knowing this metric lets you plan, budget, and forecast future growth.
For example, 5% of your website visitors take action and convert to customers. With this information, you can make better informed financial decisions regarding your marketing efforts on your website to help increase traffic and future conversions.
While there are basic conversion rate benchmarks to strive toward, it ultimately depends on your goals and the specific conversions you decide to track that are best for your business.
That being said, Matomo has some best practices to help you optimise your conversion rates, no matter what conversion metric you are tracking.
7. Exit rate
While “bounce rate” and “exit rate” are similar, “exit rate” is the percentage of visits to a website that ended on a particular page.
Knowing which pages have the highest percentage of visitors exiting your website gives you key information on the pages that may need to be improved.
If you see that your “exit rate” is highest on pages before the checkout (or other CTA’s you have established), you will want to dive into what’s causing visitors to leave from that page. For example, maybe it’s the content, the copy or even a broken link.
This is a great metric to help determine where you have breakdowns between you and your visitors. Improving your exit rate can help guide visitors through your website funnel more easily and boost your conversion rates.
8. Top pages
The top pages on your website are the pages that receive the most visits. Understanding what your top pages are can be crucial in planning and guiding your marketing strategies moving forward.
Your top pages can help you determine the most engaging content for your audience. This can be extremely helpful in guiding your visitors to certain pages that other users find more valuable.
It also helps you determine if you need to focus more attention on different parts of your website to increase user engagement in those areas.
For example, maybe your most-viewed pages have less copy and more photos or videos. Understanding this lets you know that incorporating more media into other pages will boost future engagement.
9. Traffic sources
Your traffic sources are the channels that are driving visitors to your website. The four most common traffic sources are:
- Direct Entry: Typing your website URL into their browser or visiting via a bookmark they saved
- Websites/Referral: Clicking on a link to your site from another website
- Search Engines: Using search engines (Google, Bing or Yahoo) to find your website
- Campaigns: Visitors directed to your website through specific marketing campaigns, such as email newsletters, Google Ads, promotional links, etc.
- Social Networks: Visitors accessing your website by clicking on links shared on social media platforms like Facebook, X (Twitter), LinkedIn, etc.
Understanding where your visitors are coming from can help you focus your marketing efforts on the traffic sources with the highest conversion rates.
Suppose your email marketing campaign isn’t driving any traffic to your website, but your ad campaign is responsible for over 25% of your conversions. In that case, you might consider doubling your advertising efforts.
10. Form average time spent
Forms are a crucial part of your website’s marketing strategy. Forms can help you:
- Learn more about your visitors
- Gather feedback from your audience
- Convert visitors into email subscribers
- And more
Form average time spent is the average amount of time a visitor spends on a specific form on your website. The time is calculated as the difference between the first interaction with a form field (for example, a field focus) and the last interaction with a form.
Want to convert more visitors into leads? Then, you need to understand your form analytics better. Learn more here.
11. Play rate
If you want to keep your audience engaged (and convert more visitors), you need to publish different types of media.
But if your video or audio content isn’t performing well, then you’re wasting your time.
That’s where play rate comes in. It’s calculated by analysing visitors who watched or listened to a specific media after they have visited a web page.
With play rate, you can track any video, podcast, or audiobook plays.
You can easily track it within Matomo’s Media Analytics. The best part? This feature works out of the box, so you don’t need to configure it to start leveraging the analytics.
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12. Returning visitors
Returning visitors are users who visit your website more than once over a specific time.
You will want to measure the number of returning visitors to your website, as this information can give you additional insights into your marketing strategies, company branding and content.
It can also help you better understand your customer base, giving you a clearer sense of their top desires and pain points.
13. Device type
Device type tracks the different devices visitors use to visit your website. These could be:
- Tablets
- Mobile phones
- Desktop computers
Knowing what your visitors are using to access your website can help you improve the overall user experience.
For example, if 80% of your visitors use mobile phones, you could think about optimising your web pages to format with mobile devices.
14. Top exit pages
Top exit pages are the pages that a visitor leaves your website from the most.
Each web page will have a specific exit rate percentage based on how many people leave the website on a particular page.
This can be quite helpful in understanding how visitors interact with your website. It can also help you uncover and fix any issues with your website you may not be aware of.
For instance, one of your product pages has the highest exit rate on your website. By looking into why that is, you discover that your “Add to Cart” button isn’t functioning correctly, and your visitors can’t buy that particular product, so they exit out of frustration.
15. Marketing attribution
Marketing attribution (multi-touch attribution) helps you see which touchpoints have the greatest impact on conversions.
Within Matomo, revenue attribution involves assigning credit for revenue across multiple touchpoints that contribute to a conversion.
Matomo’s multi-touch attribution models use different weighting factors, like linear or time decay, to allocate credit to each touchpoint based on its influence.
Matomo’s multi-touch attribution reports provide insights into how revenue is distributed across different touchpoints, marketing channels, campaigns, and actions. These reports allow you to analyse the contribution of each touchpoint to revenue generation and identify the most influential interactions in the customer journey.
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16. Event tracking
Every website has multiple actions a user can perform called “events”. These could be downloading a template, submitting contact information, signing up for a newsletter or clicking a link.
Tracking events can give you additional context into what your visitors are interested in or don’t care about. This allows you to target them better through those events, potentially creating new, unique conversions and boosting the growth of your business.
It can also lead to discovering potential issues within your website if you notice visitors aren’t taking action on certain CTAs, such as broken links or lack of content on certain pages. By uncovering these issues, you can quickly fix them to increase your conversions.
Start tracking your website metrics with Matomo today
There’s much to consider when creating and running your website, such as the design, copy and flow.
While these are necessary, tracking your website’s data is one of the most important aspects of running a site. It’s crucial in helping you optimise your site’s performance and create a great experience for your visitors.
Every interaction a visitor has on your site is unique and leaves valuable clues you can use to improve all aspects of your site experience.
Understanding what your visitors like, what website performance issues they’re running into and how they interact across your website is crucial to improving your marketing and sales efforts.
While tracking this much data can feel overwhelming, having all your key metrics in one place and broken down into easy-to-understand benchmarks can help alleviate the stress and headache of data tracking.
That’s where a web analytics platform like Matomo comes in.
With Matomo, you can easily track, store and analyse every piece of data on your website automatically to improve your site performance and user experience and drive conversions.
With Matomo, you can take back control with a platform that gives you 100% data ownership.
Used on over 1 million websites in over 190 countries, Matomo gives you:
- Accurate data (no data sampling)
- Privacy-friendly and GDPR-compliant analytics
- Open-source access to create a custom solution for you
Try Matomo for free for 21 days now. No credit card required.
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