Improving the e-commerce buying process with digital analytics

Is there anything data analytics cannot do?

This question occurred to me when I was having lunch with an old friend of mine. He was a high ranking executive at a large company behind some of the biggest consumer brands in the country. He was a very busy man (as was I), so whenever there was a chance to catch up, it was an opportunity that could not be missed.

After we talked about our families, politics and cricket, the discussion inevitably turned to our businesses. He told me about some of the challenges he was facing with one of the brands his company-owned.

“We are looking to expand our e-commerce branch,” he explained to me. “But right now, we are simply not where we want to be. It’s hard to find a path forward because we don’t have enough information on our current processes,” “You don’t have any data?” I asked. “No, we do, but what we need is something that can take that data and convert it into useful information that can inform our strategies,”

In other words, he needed digital analytics.

What is digital analytics, exactly?

Digital analytics is the all-encompassing term for different analytics instruments, like web analytics, social analytics and business intelligence. Analytics will collect data from different endpoints and convert them into insights that businesses can use as feedback when making decisions. With these insights, it’s much easier to complete business objectives, like optimising the buying process.

With more and more businesses going online, marketing has become more data-driven with consumer engagement, demand and brand interest becoming data-driven operations.

Analytics tools have been used to analyse qualitative and quantitive data to provide an organisation insight into how customers are responding to their marketing strategies. The information can then be used to refine the messaging and improve the overall experience.

The different categories of analytics can collect, track and analyse data from the different funnels in digital marketing. Analytics is immeasurably useful for organisations because collecting and analysing data across different data points can be time-consuming.

Digital analytics can help organisations measure the different datapoints of their marketing funnel to reveal a lot of useful information. Whether it is by measuring the number of visitors, product demand or frequently visited pages, there are plenty of variables to consider.

How can analytics optimise the buying process?

If you worked in digital marketing, you might have a passing familiarity with certain terms, like bounce rate and page views. If you don’t, that’s fine, just know that there are several KPIs to measure how customers interact with a brand online. Digital analytics takes all these KPIs and analyses them to reveal what gains have been made with current strategies.

With this insight, digital analytics helps organisations optimise the buying process to determine how consumers are interacting with their e-commerce sector. It allows marketers to make sense of the big picture.

Digital analytics allows organisations to better understand the current scenario and also predict how customers will respond in the future. Data-driven predictions can be used to anticipate future trends – this feature allows organisations to find answers to key objectives, like improving loyalty and engagement.

It’s easy for organisations to get caught up in the details and miss the larger trends. While details are very important, digital analytics helps string all the details together to answer the bigger questions on their marketing strategy.

Without analytics, organisations will have a hard time optimising their buying process because it would be difficult to understand how customers interact with the website or even on social media channels. When there is no proper insight, it would be difficult to devise new strategies to improve the buying process.

By using digital analytics, organisations can see what’s hurting the customer experience, what’s aiding it and make data-backed decisions that will optimise the buying process.

Digital analytics is an incredibly useful tool, one that every business should consider investing in. With data analytics, organisations will have an easier time creating smarter strategies that are sure to optimise the buyer’s journey to make the experience as smooth as possible. SAS offers several digital analytics products, like SAS Customer Intelligence and SAS Digital Marketing Analytics, to help organisations optimise the buying process and refine their marketing campaigns.