Web tracking is the practice of collecting, storing and sharing data about the online user behavior. Web tracking will provide helpful insights to understand how the user navigates on your site, how individuals reacts to your content and what’s important to this individuals. It can collect valuable data from different channels such as Social Media, Ad platforms, Email Marketing, SMS, CRM, Search Engines and Offline Data.
How Does Website Tracking Works?
The web tracking in E-commerce or other websites is generally cookie-based. Cookies are pieces of javascript code that stores information about your behavior as an individual on your browser. Marketers rely on third-party cookies to track online consumer behavior, but this is changing because of privacy protection that is being implemented by companies like Apple, Firefox, Google, and browser-level blocking, third-party ad blocking apps, new GDPR regulations and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).
Data Collection
Data extraction helps organizations to take ownership of its data and gain a deep familiarity with the sales funnel and its impact on the bottom line. This is an essential part of the analytics process in order to meet business expectations.
Data collection is the process of gathering quantitative and/or qualitative data to help answering business questions, test hypothesis and evaluate business performance.
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How to Measure E-commerce Performance
In order to measure the success of your website, an effective strategy of data extraction must be in place. Selecting the analytical procedures and defining best practices of data collection are the key factors to ensure marketing success and to make the organization more data-focused.
Here are four steps to make sure you are successfully measuring your Ecommerce performance:
1. Traffic Tracking
The must-have analytics tool to track traffic, user engagement and conversions is Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics. It is a free tool that provides you with a complete tracking of the customer conversion path. It includes Audience Analysis, Acquisition, Engagement and Funnel Analysis.
2. Behavior Tracking
A very important part of the user analysis is in the Middle part Of the Funnel, the MOFU. Here is where the user has arrived at your landing page, did not puke and left, and is interacting with your site. The best way to measure user engagement is with event tracking and page level analysis.
3. Experience Tracking
In order to analyze the User Experience (UX) performance, you can use User Behavior Analytics (UBA) tools such as heat maps, user recordings and feedback widgets. According to Hotjar, UBA collects, combine and analyze quantitative and qualitative data to understand how users interact with a website or product.
4. Cookie-based Tracking
The majority of the tracking systems still work with cookies. The downside of this strategy of tracking is that is limited to the browser, so if the user clears the cache, the information is gone. Another downside is with privacy of the users, that makes it vulnerable for potential law suits.
Using Data on Ads Targeting
The reason of so much data collection is to help segment your audience and define which buckets of users aligns best with the company mission, culture and products. Below are some examples of ads targeting that uses user behavior data:
Content-based Targeting
With content-based targeting the ads are based on what content the user is consuming instead of your overall behavior profile. So when you’re reading an article on how to improve the Click-through rate of your email marketing campaigns you’ll see ads for relevant email automation systems.
People-based Targeting
Facebook Analytics has brought us a different perspective with user id tracking and no longer the device-base tracking. This method of tracking is focused in customer identification data, where if you are logged-in into Facebook or Google, for example, you are being tracked independently if you are in a different device. This leaves a lot of opportunity for Mobile Marketing to target its customers.
How organizations can benefit from web tracking?
- It helps you learn more about your customers.
- It provides you with the data that can be deciphered into actionable strategies for improvements.
- Ensures a data-driven focus to help on the decision-making process.
- It gives companies valuable insights for better targeting advertising.
- It helps on the Quality Assurance (QA) process, to show you potential technical implementation issues.
Now It’s Your Turn!
Understanding your customers needs and knowing your numbers is a decisive factor to win in the online business. By measuring your entire customer conversion path across multiple touch points and over time enables you to improve customer experience and create more positive business outcomes.