Picture this: You’ve just finished crafting the perfect online store. You’ve designed your site to provide a seamless experience, filled your ecommerce store with tempting products, and even drummed up some early traffic on social media. But when you open your analytics dashboard, you face a harsh reality. Very few of the visitors convert to sales. Instead of celebrating your ecommerce launch, you’re left with a sinking feeling and a million questions. What’s causing the lack of sales? What data can tell me more about my visitors? How can I use this information to improve my store and drive sales? The best ecommerce analytics tools help you make sense of your store's data to implement a streamlined, TikTok Ecommerce Strategy, data-driven ecommerce strategy that boosts sales, optimizes marketing, and drives consistent growth. In this article, we’ll explore the best ecommerce analytics tools on the market.
One tool that can help you start on your journey to e-commerce success is Shophunter’s Shopify sales tracker. This easy-to-use tool lets you quickly understand your store’s sales data to uncover trends, pinpoint issues, and discover growth opportunities.
What Are Ecommerce Analytics Tools?
Ecommerce analytics tools collect, process, and analyze customer and sales data in ecommerce settings. These customer analytics platforms expand and contract to fit your needs, from high-level overviews of market trends affecting your ecommerce business to granular data about individual customers.
This information lets you quickly identify patterns and spot opportunities to improve digital marketing and customer acquisition. For example, a campaign to promote hiking gear may perform well in email channels but not on social media. Being aware of this can inspire you to pivot your strategy.
Tailoring Your Analytics Strategy to Your Business Needs
Whatever your budget or goals, there’s an analytics tool for you. Essential tools offer standard reports and metrics, like:
Sales performance
Traffic sources
Conversion rates
Average order value
These tools provide valuable insights into how your marketing campaigns impact your online store’s performance.
More advanced analytics tools maximize your digital marketing efforts in various ways. They provide real-time:
Sales data
Predictive analytics
Custom reports
For example, an advanced marketing analytics tool can show you which customer groups and marketing channels perform best during a holiday sale, helping you adjust your messaging and inventory to boost results.
Ecommerce Analytics Tools Unpacked: Types of Grocery Analytics Tools
This section will explore the various e-commerce analytics tools, which are categorized into four main groups: web analytics, customer behavior analytics, sales and revenue analytics, and marketing analytics tools.
These tools provide essential insights to help businesses optimize their online presence and drive growth.
Web Analytics Tools
Web analytics tools are fundamental to ecommerce analytics, providing insights into how visitors interact with your website. A widespread tool like Google Analytics enables businesses to track and analyze key metrics such as:
Website traffic
Bounce rate
Conversion rate
Web analytics tools monitor user behavior on a website and help identify trends and patterns that can inform design improvements and content optimization. For example, understanding which pages have the highest bounce rate can help you address potential issues and enhance user experience. Furthermore, these tools assist in identifying the sources of website traffic, such as:
Organic search
Paid advertisements
Social media
Using Web Analytics to Improve Conversion Rates
This information allows businesses to evaluate the effectiveness of their marketing strategies and allocate resources more efficiently. Web analytics tools are essential for gaining insights into your website’s performance and behavior. They enable you to make data-driven decisions that improve user experience and increase conversion rate.
Customer Behavior Analytics Tools
Customer behavior analytics tools focus on understanding the actions and preferences of your online visitors. By analyzing customer behavior, businesses can gain valuable customer insights that help them tailor their offerings and marketing strategies to better meet the needs of their target audience. These tools collect and analyze customer data from various touchpoints, including:
Browsing patterns
Product views
Cart additions
Purchase history
This information enables businesses to create detailed customer profiles, segment their audience, and personalize their marketing efforts. Customer behavior analytics tools also help companies map the customer journey—the series of interactions with a brand from the moment customers land on the website to the point of conversion.
Leveraging Customer Insights for Personalized Marketing
By examining the customer journey, businesses can identify potential pain points and areas of friction that may be hindering conversions. These tools can track individual customers’ behavior over time, revealing patterns that can be leveraged for targeted marketing campaigns and personalized product recommendations.
In essence, customer behavior analytics tools provide essential insights that empower businesses to understand better:
Their audience
Optimize their marketing strategies
Ultimately, it drives customer loyalty and revenue growth
Sales and Revenue Analytics Tools
Sales and revenue analytics tools play a critical role in monitoring and optimizing the financial performance of ecommerce businesses.
By evaluating sales data, these tools enable businesses to track and analyze essential e-commerce metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs), such as:
Revenue
Profit margins
Growth rates
Financial analytics delves deeper, using this information to assess:
Profitability
Cash flow
Return on investment (ROI)
This specialized analysis provides actionable insights to guide financial decision-making.
One crucial metric that sales and revenue analytics tools help businesses monitor is the average order value (AOV). This metric reflects the average amount customers spend per transaction, providing insights into purchasing patterns and customer preferences. By analyzing AOV, businesses can develop strategies to increase order values, such as:
Cross-selling
Upselling
Offering incentives for larger purchases
Analyzing Sales and Revenue Performance
Another crucial metric these tools can help track is the customer lifetime value (CLV). This measure indicates the total revenue a business can expect from a single customer throughout its relationship with the brand. Understanding CLV can help companies determine their customers’ long-term value and guide customer retention and acquisition strategies.
Sales and revenue analytics tools provide businesses with information on ecommerce KPIs and metrics that drive financial performance, enabling them to make informed decisions and optimize their strategies for sustained growth.
Marketing Analytics Tools
Marketing analytics tools are essential for tracking and measuring the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. It provides valuable insights that inform future decision-making. These tools enable businesses to assess the performance of:
Various marketing campaigns
Strategies
Channels
Businesses can use a marketing analytics tool to identify the marketing initiatives that generate the highest return on investment (ROI) and focus their resources on the most effective strategies. These tools can analyze:
Email marketing performance
Social media
Content marketing
Paid advertising, including Google Ads
Understanding the success of different marketing strategies helps businesses optimize their campaigns and allocate their marketing budget more effectively.
Using Marketing Analytics to Optimize Campaigns
These tools provide insights into customers, which are crucial for evaluating the overall success of marketing efforts, including:
Acquisition costs
Conversion rates
Customer retention
Furthermore, marketing analytics tools can help businesses identify the most valuable marketing channels for reaching their target audience.
This information allows them to tailor their marketing efforts to the channels that deliver the best results, maximizing their marketing impact and driving growth. Marketing analytics tools are critical in:
Optimizing marketing strategies
Maximizing ROI
Ensuring the long-term success of ecommerce businesses
The Advantages of Investing in Ecommerce Analytics
Investing in ecommerce analytics tools means investing in the future of your business. Here are a few undeniable reasons why you should consider this investment:
Stronger Decision-Making
Have you ever tried shopping for a recipe without knowing the ingredients? As you browse the grocery aisles, you hope you pick the correct items and that your dinner turns out well. Ecommerce marketers face a similar dilemma when optimizing their campaigns or planning for the future without the proper customer data. It’s time to stop crossing your fingers and hoping for the best.
Ecommerce analytics provides the data-driven insights you need to succeed while saving time and marketing spend. Unsurprisingly, 97% of business leaders want data to guide their operations, with 44% explicitly looking to enhance their decision-making.
Better Customer Understanding
For years, marketers created an ideal customer profile and tailored campaigns around it, assuming customers would move along the sales funnel as expected. In 2024, basic demographics like age and gender aren’t enough; you must understand customers’ specific needs and how your product can help. This is where ecommerce analytics tools shine. These tools analyze sales data and reveal customer insights that might go unnoticed by human eyes, which will help you enhance customer engagement.
For instance, customers who purchase new luggage may be significantly more likely to buy packing cubes within a week. Knowing this lets you target your product recommendations accordingly:
Heighten customer retention
Rake in more sales
Enjoy a sharp advantage over your competitors
Improved Marketing Strategies
Monitoring your digital marketing campaigns can be challenging. Human team members can’t watch campaigns 24/7 and constantly evaluate the results — but automation can. With help from machine learning and artificial intelligence, ecommerce analytics tools study campaign results and distill the information into the most relevant takeaways for your marketing team.
Your team can use these actionable insights to inform your marketing strategy and achieve better ROI. Clear data visualization makes it easier to sell your marketing ideas to your boss so you can roll out bigger and better campaigns next time.
Key Features To Look for in Ecommerce Analytics Tools
Many ecommerce analytics solutions claim to be the best, but what features define a solid tool? Here are a few things to look for:
Real-Time Ecommerce Data
Customer data constantly changes, and the numbers you received yesterday may be irrelevant today. Collecting real-time data as it rolls in ensures your team always has the most accurate picture of your customers’ brand interactions. This always-fresh first-party data helps you understand what your customers are doing now so you can immediately change your marketing plans.
Let’s say your platform shows a sudden increase in website traffic from a particular social media site. You quickly adjust your ad spending to take advantage of this trend and reach more people before losing momentum. Without real-time data, you might miss this trend and lose out on potential gains.
Customer Behavior Tracking
Customers are creatures of habit with unique purchasing patterns. Understanding what they add to their online shopping cart and where they buy is necessary to level up your marketing game and boost customer lifetime value. Ecommerce analytics tools do more than track the types of products your customers buy. They also reveal insights into customer preferences like their most-used channels:
In-store
Online
SMS
By knowing where and how your customers engage with your brand, you can refine your digital marketing strategies to target the most effective channels and avoid ineffective approaches.
Using ecommerce analytics and AI to understand which channels customers prefer. These tools also help identify larger purchasing patterns and trends. For example, as a clothing retailer, you might see a shift from festival clothing to swimwear as spring turns to summer. This insight allows you to adjust your inventory and provide a personalized customer experience, increasing satisfaction rates by at least 20%.
Sales Performance Analysis
Introducing new products and managing existing stock can be challenging. In the past, ecommerce businesses didn’t have tools to help them predict what would sell or how much to keep in stock, so they mainly relied on guesswork. This made it hard to avoid running out of popular items or having too much stuff. Customer analytics tools make these issues a thing of the past.
They offer the sales performance analysis needed to identify top-performing products, understand sales trends, and forecast how well these products will perform. With this data at your fingertips, you’ll no longer have to guess whether a new product variation will succeed or risk ending up with too much or too little stock by the end of the season.
Customizable Dashboards
Ecommerce analytics tools spit out a lot of data. To make sense of it all, you need a dashboard that’s easy to understand. Look for providers offering user-friendly dashboards that clearly present data without overwhelming your team with complex numbers.
The ShopHunter sales tracker offers a unique tool for ecom founders, particularly those in the Shopify ecosystem. At its core, it is a custom algorithm that estimates sales for entire stores and specific products, helping users quickly validate product potential.
The platform goes beyond basic sales tracking, featuring an ad spy tool that monitors advertising activity across stores. This combination lets users spot trending products and successful marketing strategies early on.
2. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a widely used eCommerce analytics tool for small and mid-sized eCommerce store owners for its vast wealth of data. It provides a comprehensive overview of your website’s performance, including:
The number of visitors
Pages viewed
Bounce rate
Conversion rate
3. Crazy Egg
Crazy Egg is a user-testing analytics tool enabling eCommerce marketing teams to analyze customer responses to various website elements. It is famous for its:
Heatmaps
Visual reports
Scroll maps
4. Kissmetrics
Kissmetrics is an advanced web analytics tool that helps store owners track and analyze customer behavior throughout the customer journey.
5. Hotjar
Hotjar is a popular all-in-one analytics software that helps eCommerce businesses understand customers’ behavior, optimize landing pages, and increase conversions.
6. MetricsWatch
MetricsWatch is a comprehensive tool designed to automate and customize email reports for marketing campaigns. It is particularly suited for marketing agencies looking to present performance metrics to clients efficiently and professionally.
7. Mixpanel
Mixpanel is a product analytics solution that allows teams in real-time across devices to improve user experience and to analyze how users quickly:
Engage
Convert
It is suitable for:
Small businesses
Mid-sized businesses
Large enterprises
8. Glew.io
Glew.io is a website analytics tool that provides eCommerce businesses with insights into:
Customer behavior
Sales
Marketing data
With over 180+ integrations, it is best for multichannel online retailers.
9. Databox
Databox is a cloud-based eCommerce analytics tool popular for consolidating data from different sources into a single dashboard. This makes it easy to track key metrics in one place like:
Sales
Traffic
Customer behavior
DataBox is suitable for small to large eCommerce businesses.
10. Optimizely
This eCommerce analytics software helps businesses personalize their websites by providing valuable insights into customer behavior, such as:
Clicks
Scroll depth
Purchases
Page views
11. Woopra
Woopra is a powerful eCommerce analytics tool that provides businesses comprehensive insights into their website’s performance, customer behavior, and sales funnel. It has 50+ one-click integrations with platforms like:
Marketo
Salesforce
Intercom
12. Supermetrics
Supermetrics gives a snapshot of data from 100+ sales and marketing platforms into the analytics and reporting tool. It is best for eCommerce businesses that want to understand their marketing data better.
13. Matomo
Matomo, formerly Piwik, is an open-source web analytics tool with two hosting options:
Cloud
On-premise
It provides a comprehensive insight into customer behaviors and has many features, such as:
Session recordings
Heatmaps
Form analytics
14. Shopify Analytics
Shopify Analytics gives you insight into your store’s recent activities. In addition, it helps you analyze your eCommerce store transactions.
15. WooCommerce Analytics
WooCommerce Analytics is the free, open-source reporting and data analysis tool for over 7 million WordPress websites that use WooCommerce to power their ecommerce platforms. Its functionality is limited to sales analytics, but the tool is easy to customize, and reports can be viewed within the WordPress dashboard.
16. Geckoboard
Geckoboard helps thousands of businesses keep track of ecommerce KPIs in real time. It’s the perfect tool for monitoring what’s happening so you can react fast. Whether that’s spotting that unfulfilled orders are building up or that your Ad spend has suddenly dropped to Zero. Geckoboard will save you time logging into multiple platforms throughout the day, giving you peace of mind that everything is on track.
17. HubSpot
HubSpot's Marketing Analytics and Dashboard Software provide an all-in-one platform to measure and analyze marketing campaign performance.
18. Triple Whale
Triple Whale is a cutting-edge analytics tool and marketing automation software powered by AI. It helps you track your return on ad spend (ROAS) across marketing channels, enabling more intelligent budget allocation and decision-making to target customers effectively.
19. SessionStack
SessionStack is a digital experience analytics platform that empowers high-traffic e-commerce businesses to truly understand their users’ behavior with impactful, actionable insights derived from an industry-first, AI-enhanced session recording technology. By incorporating continuous data-driven conversion rate optimizations in their processes, they can deliver an excellent and ever-improving shopping experience.
20. Heap
Heap is a modern analytics platform that lets you analyze user interactions with your online properties. For eCommerce businesses, it unveils how customers navigate your online storefront, providing a complete view of the buyer's journey.
21. Looker
Looker (formerly "Google Data Studio") is a data dashboard and reporting tool. Like Polymer, it has a drag-and-drop dashboard builder and supports numerous data collection integrations.
22. CAKE
CAKE is a marketing analytics platform providing an eCommerce data management solution. This lets you design visualized reports for:
Product management
Voucher attribution
Inventory management, etc.
23. Bluecore
Bluecore is a unique eCommerce analytics platform providing AI predictive models and customer intelligence tools to improve decision-making. It also includes personalized marketing tools for your:
Email
Paid media
Mobile
On-page channels
24. Conjura
Conjura is an analytics solution that automates data analysis and uses industry benchmarks to provide actionable recommendations. The process starts with an "eAssessment" that evaluates your eCommerce business data and generates readable reports.
25. Polymer
Polymer is a powerful and flexible BI solution that lets you create stunning eCommerce data dashboards.
How to Choose the Best Analytics Tools for Ecommerce
Check for Platform Compatibility to Boost Efficiency
Selecting an e-commerce analytics tool seamlessly integrates with your existing systems is crucial for maximizing efficiency and data accuracy. Look for tools that offer integration capabilities with your:
eCommerce platform
Ensure the analytics tool integrates smoothly with your e-commerce platform, whether using:
Shopify
WooCommerce
Magento
Another solution
This integration within the analytics platform, lets you:
Directly access sales data
Product information
Customer details
Marketing tools
Choose a tool that integrates with your:
Marketing automation software
Email marketing platforms
Advertising networks such as
Google Ads
Facebook Ads
Customer data platform and social media management tools
Integration with these platforms allows you to analyze the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and track ROI accurately.
Other business systems
Consider how the analytics tool integrates with other business systems, such as:
Opting for a user-friendly analytics tool with intuitive interfaces and customizable dashboards simplifies the data analysis and empowers employees at all skill levels to get insights. Look for features such as:
Intuitive interface
Choose a tool with a clean, user-friendly interface that makes it easy to navigate and access the most important eCommerce metrics and reports.
Customizable dashboards
Select a tool to create custom dashboards tailored to your business objectives and reporting needs. Customizable dashboards help you focus on the metrics that matter most to your e-commerce operations and monitor performance at a glance.
Drag-and-drop reporting
Prioritize tools offering drag-and-drop functionality for creating ad-hoc reports and visualizations without requiring coding or technical expertise. Drag-and-drop reporting helps you build custom reports quickly and explore data dynamically.
Check for Scalability to Accommodate Future Growth
Ensuring that the chosen e-commerce analytics tool can scale alongside your business is essential for accommodating future growth and evolving data needs. Consider the following scalability factors:
Data volume
Evaluate the tool’s capacity to handle large volumes of data generated by your e-commerce operations, including:
Traffic
Transactions
Customer interactions
Scalable analytics tools can process and analyze increasing data volumes without compromising performance.
Advanced analytics capabilities
Look for tools that offer advanced analytics features, such as:
Choose a flexible pricing model tool that aligns with your business growth trajectory. Scalable pricing options, such as pay-as-you-go or tiered pricing based on usage, allow you to scale your analytics investment incrementally as your e-commerce operations grow.
Research Customer Support Ratings
Selecting a vendor that provides responsive customer support and comprehensive resources is essential. Ask anyone who’s had to deal with unresponsive backing. Consider the following:
Technical support
Ensure the vendor offers timely and knowledgeable technical support to assist with:
Tool implementation
Configuration
Troubleshooting
Responsive technical support minimizes downtime and ensures the smooth operation of the analytics platform.
Training and documentation
Look for vendors that provide comprehensive training resources, including:
Tutorials
Documentation
Knowledge base articles
Accessible training materials empower users to leverage the full capabilities of the analytics tool and enhance their data analysis skills. The best you can get is white-glove onboarding with a training session for the entire team.
Community and forums
Evaluate the availability of user communities, forums, and peer-to-peer support channels where users can:
Exchange insights
Best practices
Troubleshooting tips
Check for Support of Key E-Commerce Metrics
When selecting an e-commerce data analytics tool, it’s essential to prioritize those that track key metrics crucial for evaluating your eCommerce store performance and growth potential. These metrics include:
Website Traffic
Understand where your traffic is coming from, including:
Organic search
Social media
Paid advertising
Analyze these metrics to identify opportunities for optimization, such as:
Visitor demographics
Behavior
Engagement conversion rates
Measure the percentage of visitors who complete a desired action on your website, such as:
Purchasing
Signing up for a newsletter
Filling out a contact form
Tracking conversion rates allows you to assess the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and website design.
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
Determine the total value a customer brings to your business over their relationship with your brand. By analyzing CLV, you can:
Identify your most valuable customers
Tailor marketing efforts to retain them
Calculate the return on investment (ROI) for customer acquisition
Average Order Value (AOV)
Evaluate the average amount customers spend in each transaction. Increasing AOV can boost revenue and profitability without necessarily acquiring more customers.
Cart abandonment rate
Monitor the percentage of users who add items to their shopping cart but still need to complete the checkout process.
Sign Up for a Free Trial (no credit card required) to Our Shopify Sales Tracker to Find Your Next eCom Opportunity Today!
ShopHunter’s Shopify sales tracker offers an innovative tool for eCommerce founders, particularly those in the Shopify ecosystem. At its core, it is a custom algorithm that estimates sales for entire stores and specific products, helping users quickly validate product potential. The platform goes beyond basic sales tracking, featuring an ad spy tool that monitors advertising activity across stores.
This combination lets users spot trending products and successful marketing strategies early on. ShopHunter aims to streamline product research and reduce the risk of investing in low-performing items, whether you’re:
A dropshipper
A Shopify store owner
Someone looking to enter the eCommerce space
Sign up for a free trial (no credit card required) to our Shopify sales tracker tool to find your next ecommerce opportunity or to level up your current ecommerce store by learning from your competitors.