For all ecommerce brands in 2024, a successful marketing strategy is imperative to building a sustainable, long-term business. Rising ad, raw material, and operating costs make each and every aspect important. One of the main ways you can monitor each piece of your marketing efforts is by defining a conversion funnel (also called a sales funnel) and optimizing your conversion funnel tracking, from first click all the way to checkout.
The conversion funnel measures the customer journey by mapping all the steps a potential customer goes through, from their first contact with your brand to actually making a purchase. To improve it, it’s necessary to analyze specific metrics to determine any friction points or opportunities.
Understanding how conversion funnel tracking works and how you can use analytics to improve it is essential for developing a profitable marketing strategy. Want to understand how you can make changes starting today? Keep reading to discover how you can use ecommerce analytics to improve your conversion funnel.
The Importance of Ecommerce Data Analytics
Ecommerce analytics go beyond simply tracking visitors—it’s about going deep into data to identify opportunities, trends, and possible bottlenecks in your strategy. Tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) like conversion rate (CVR), average order value (AOV), and customer acquisition costs (CAC) is crucial to receive actionable insights into how well your online store is performing. Without accurate analytics, you’re basically relying on gut feelings.
There are analytics apps out there to help you with this. Analytics for Shopify is a useful tool to monitor these metrics in real time to show a clear picture of what’s happening at each stage of a conversion funnel. For instance, Shopify’s built-in analytics can show you how users interact with your landing page, where they drop off in the checkout process, and which products sell best in your store. Meanwhile, Google Analytics’ in-depth tracking capabilities allow you to get a clearer picture of attribution through multiple channels and funnels.
Many of these ecommerce analytics tools, however, require third-party integration with your store or landing pages. With Replo Analytics, however, you can track all of these vital metrics for your Replo landing pages in real time, using live first-party data from your own store.
Pairing these insights with metrics that suit the specifics of your business open space for optimization opportunities that would go unnoticed if you didn’t keep track of ecommerce analytics.
By properly analyzing these metrics, you can make data-driven decisions that can improve many aspects of your conversion funnel, resulting in positive results like a smoother user experience (which leads to a reduced cart abandonment rate) and more dialed-in marketing strategy (which results in lower CACs). When used correctly, ecommerce analytics are your roadmap to growth, more conversions, and a more efficient customer journey.
At the end of the day, it isn’t about looking at random numbers, it’s about sharpening the focus of your online store into a well-oiled money machine.
Understanding the Essential Ecommerce Metrics
Focusing on metrics that have an outsized impact on your online store is vital to guiding the performance of your business as a whole—both in terms of revenue and profit, as well as customer loyalty (retention), brand favorability, and referrals.
There are a ton of ecommerce metrics you could track, but the most essential ones are:
Conversion Rate (CVR)
It measures the percentage of site visitors who complete a desired action, like making a purchase or paying for a community subscription. Conversion rate is a key measurement of how well your landing page is turning traffic into sales. Lowering this metric is crucial for increasing revenue without the need to drive more traffic (spending more on ads).
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
Your CAC represents the expenses of acquiring a new customer, which can be tracked in platform via Meta, TikTok, etc. This metric helps you determine whether your efforts to attract new customers are effective or if your campaigns are just eating profits without positive results.
Lifetime Value (LTV)
LTV measures the total revenue a customer generates throughout their entire relationship with your brand. It’s important to understand the long-term profitability of each individual customer because having a high LTV allows you to spend more to acquire a customer—lose money or break even on the “front end,” make money on the “back end.”
Average Order Value (AOV)
This value represents the amount of money customers spend on each order. It tracks customer spending habits, helping you develop offers that encourage higher spending, like bundling products or free shipping thresholds. Increasing AOV can significantly impact the bottom of your conversion funnel without increasing top-of-funnel energy or spend.
Cart Abandonment Rate
The cart abandonment rate is the percentage of customers who add items to their cart, but leave without completing a purchase. This metric signifies potential friction in the checkout process that may arise, such as unexpected shipping costs, slow page speeds (a one-second delay in page load time results in a 7% loss in conversions based on a study from Aberdeen Strategy & Research), or limited payment methods. Identifying these frictions is the first step to correcting them and reducing cart abandonment rate.
Breaking Down the Ecommerce Conversion Funnel
We already talked a little bit about the conversion funnel and how it represents the customer journey from the first discovery to making a purchase. Essentially, it functions as a strategic map divided in stages: top, middle, and bottom. Each stage represents levels of engagement and intent, and your goal as an entrepreneur or marketer is to guide potential costumes through the funnel as smoothly as possible from the top to the bottom.
To do this, it’s crucial to track key metrics (most of them already presented above) to understand where exactly in the funnel potential customers might be dropping off and where you can optimize. When done right, funnel optimization can increase conversion rates, drive more sales, and boost retention.
Let’s break down the stages of a conversion funnel:
Top of Funnel: Awareness and Interest Metrics
This is the first stage where potential customers first become aware of your brand and start to develop interest in your products. The top of the funnel (TOFU) is all about broad exposure and offering value, so the goal in this stage is to gain as many eyeballs as possible (through ads or organically).
Doing that usually involves strategies like social media marketing, content marketing, paid advertising, and SEO. This is a more educational phase, where metrics to be measured are usually website traffic and bounce rates, among others. The main function of the top of the funnel is to analyze the prospecting of qualified leads for the company.
Middle of Funnel: Consideration and Intent Metrics
The middle of the funnel (MOFU) is the "nurturing" phase, where marketing strategies are aimed at creating or sharing content that gives your target audience the ability to consider your products and services as valid options.
At this stage, buyers already have some knowledge about your products and services, but are still evaluating whether they are the best options. For this reason, offers and discounts, case studies, and email campaigns are tactics to convert awareness into dollars. Analyzing intent metrics like customer retention and email open rates are essential in this stage of the conversion funnel.
Bottom of Funnel: Conversion and Purchase
At the bottom of the funnel (BOFU), potential customers are in the final stages of making a decision. They’re at the last stages of evaluating whether they should buy from you or a competitor.
Because of this, this is a stage where businesses should adopt specific conversion strategies to ensure their leads turn into customers. Some key strategies include directly engaging with potential customers to address their questions and concerns, offering limited-time offers on their sales platforms, and investing in retargeting ads campaigns.
A conversion funnel may change depending on the nature of the product, with different specific steps and metrics to keep track of.
Optimizing Ecommerce Landing Pages for Conversions
Now that you know the importance of analytics in ecommerce, the main metrics to measure, and how a conversion funnel works, it's time to optimize your landing page to achieve these conversions.
Your landing page is often an early impression a potential customer has of your brand, and a well-designed page helps reduce friction and drive action. The goal of an optimized landing page is to ensure that when visitors land on your page, they find exactly what they need, quickly and in a way that encourages them to take the next step (mostly through well-written and intuitively-placed calls to action).
The main elements of an optimized landing page include visual consistency, compelling copywriting, and strong CTAs. A “busy” landing page with too many options and inconsistent imagery can overwhelm visitors and cause drop offs. For this matter, A/B testing alternative versions with analytics tools could help fine tune your landing page (more on that later).
For now, let’s take a look at other key points of conversion funnel optimization:
Continuity Between Paid Advertisements and Landing Pages
Maintaining continuity between your paid ads across marketing channels and the landing pages is a key factor in optimizing them. When potential customers click on an ad, they expect the landing page to deliver on the promise made in the respective ad.
For example, if an ad promotes a specific discount for a product or service on social media, the landing page should highlight that offer using similar visuals and wording. This continuity between paid ads and landing pages boosts confidence and minimizes the chances of any problem related to misinformation.
A well built landing page that has continuity with its ad campaign reduces friction and guides customers smoothly through the conversion funnel.
SEO and Organic Traffic
While paid traffic is crucial, organic traffic is still the cheapest method for attracting customers simply because it’s technically free. Making websites SEO friendly involves using relevant keywords in titles, meta descriptions, headers in blog posts, and more, and making your site’s UX smooth overall to improve visibility on Google and other search engines.
According to Forbes, click-through rates (CTR) declined at an average of 32.3% for each position on the first page. Which means that the closer your page is to the first place in search engines, the more clicks it’ll get and the more organic traffic it’ll gain. And that’s exactly what good SEO should do for your brand.
Factors like page load speed, mobile-friendliness, and readability all play a role in how search engines rank your page. Optimizing these elements can help you adjust your SEO strategies to drive high-intent visitors and generate organic traffic.
Use Analytics Tools to Refine Landing Pages
Data-driven optimization is the key to creating an ecommerce landing page for conversions, with analytic tools you can analyze and understand how users interact with your store. Some tools even provide heatmaps and scroll tracking tools that allow you to see which part of your landing page visitors are mostly interacting with and which CTA buttons or hyperlinks are being used.
If your bounce rate—the number of unengaged sessions on your landing page—is high, it could indicate that the landing page isn’t meeting users expectations. And there could be for a number of reasons like slow loading times, confusing layouts, or unimportant content for what they’re looking for.
With constant analysis of metrics using analytic tools, you can refine your landing pages and create an experience that not only captures traffic, but also drives conversions.
Closing Thoughts: Create Great Landing Pages with Replo
Ecommerce analytics are vital for optimizing a landing page’s performance. Using insights from tools like Shopify Analytics, businesses can define their strategies in a conversion funnel and ensure that their landing pages drive revenue effectively.
And for businesses looking to create their first landing page, Replo offers a powerful, no-code Shopify landing page builder. You can quickly build a page, run effective A/B tests, and use data to improve performance and address any possible customer pain points.
Don’t know anything about web design? You don’t need to. Replo has an extensive library of high-converting landing page templates, a supportive community of experts, and 24/7 support to help you build the perfect landing page for your business.
For additional tools and information on everything marketing and ecommerce, visit our blog, or get in touch to arrange a demo. Also, make sure to follow us on X and join our Slack community!