Ecommerce analytics is the process of accumulating and analyzing all data related to your online store. Analyzing that data should provide insights related to your customer behavior and online shopping trends for your business. This is in service of better understanding of what channels are the best for acquiring customers, how they are interacting with your digital content and marketing efforts, what they are purchasing and when, and how you are retaining those customers.

Ecommerce analytics should give you the full picture of your business performance online so you can refine your acquisition efforts, marketing communications, product strategy, website performance and more. A major part of this is personalizing the customer experience. Ecommerce analytics data should ideally equip you with everything you need to deliver content, promotions, recommendations, etc. that offers value to your customers at every stage of their customer journey. The days of mass e-blasts to whole swathes of your customers without segmenting or tailoring content are far in the rearview mirror. Ecommerce brands that are winning the most are using deep segmentation of their customer data to personalize the customer journey and boost loyalty, increase retention, and drive major growth.

There are many facets for ecommerce analytics to expand upon. The way you ingest and understand attribution and acquisition data is entirely different from how you view and take action upon retention data. Since there are so many contributing factors to ecommerce analytics, we’ve broken everything down into the need-to-know categories that further explain types of analytics, helpful hints for ecommerce brands, and DTC strategy that will help any online business grow.