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7 Ways Real-Time Analytics Can Increase Your eCommerce CRO

krithika siddharth
Updated ·7 min read
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Let's face it, the eCommerce industry is a hard place to survive in.

Problem #1
You are competing with over a million other eCommerce stores.Looking at the eCommerce metrics of how much revenue they generate based on their rankings, it's not really a pretty sight.

eCommerce Stats

Source: RJMetrics

34% of the total revenue is shared by the eCommerce website belonging to tier 1 category and the remaining websites are forced to fight out for the remaining 66%.

Problem #2
Even if you manage to bring people onto your website, the odds are, they wouldn't convert. The average conversion rate of an eCommerce store is 2-3%. That is, for every 100 visitors, you are probably making only 2 to 3 sales.

How do You succeed against all odds?
The biggest hurdle for your eCommerce site's success is the poor conversion rate. Your site can have terrific traffic but when it fails to convert, nothing else matters. The amount of dollars spent on paid ads and campaigns have yielded nothing in return.

To improve your conversion, real-time data is the perfect solution. You not only get to understand how users perceive your website by monitoring their behavior in real-time, it also uncovers your website's pain-points that has been hindering your conversion rate.

Real-Time Analytics Hacks To Improve Your Conversion
Harness the power of real-time data and improve your website's UI/UX to not only improve your conversion rate but also build a league of loyal customers who would love what your online store has to offer. Here are 7 ways that you can use Real Time data to improve conversion.

Understand Your User's Behavioral Pattern

You might think each user is different and understanding how they use your website is next to impossible. That's where you are wrong!

All your users are different, but they all can be profiled under different demographic groups.When you have enough data points to measure, you will slowly start recognizing a consistent pattern. This pattern is crucial for your business as this makes is how your users navigate through your website, making it their behavioral pattern. You can then target the group's pattern to increase conversion.

How can Real-Time analytics help?
Well, let's say you have been monitoring your website for a few days now and you find peak conversion around 9pmeveryday, then you have a pattern right there. By planning a social media campaign or sending out a mailer by 8.30pm, you will greatly improve traffic to your site around 9pm and thus increase your conversion rate.

Design The Perfect Navigation And Product Catalogue

Real-time analysis is so powerful, it can show you in-depth information about how users navigate through your website. Understanding your customer preferences can help you build a robust navigation.

How can Real-Time analytics help?
You can either redesign your navigation field by highlighting categories that users prefer or even give shortcuts to such preferred categories. It helps users to get to their favorite products easily, making product discovery faster to improve conversion rate.

Provide Instant Personalized Offers

Real time analytics are great for learning about your customers. Most of your customers want to buy something, but they don't act upon it. Why? It could be because the price is too high or they might feel it's unnecessary.The key is to trigger impulsiveness to get them to convert.
How can Real-Time analytics help?

Notice a customer spending a lot of time on a product, but doesn't seem to buy?
Real-time analytics can help you come up with offers that can be instantly provided to those customers.

Personalized offers like "Buy now and get X% off" pushes users to convert. You can either send push messages, email or pop-ups to such users stating "Your favorite product is on sale, still interested? Buy it now and get X% discount." Even if you can get few of users to convert, it's good for your overall eCommerce conversion rate.

This works best when you just started building your eCommerce store and looking to convert maximum traffic into paying customers.

Know Why Customers Abandon YouAnd Act

Notice your customers don't traverse after a particular point? If one or two customers leave, it might be a natural phenomenon. But when there are multiple drop-offs at the exact same place, then you are on to something.

How can Real-Time analytics help?
You have identified one of your eCommerce pain points. The fact is that every website has multiple pain points, even if you are a website guru and have a well-optimized website. Setting event triggers help you to take instant action and rectify the issue.

  • Set an event trigger when there is a sudden decrease in the website load time. Your visitors could be leaving because of that!

  • A trigger when users abandons their cart can help you send them personalized offers to bring them back

  • Set a trigger to intimate sudden peak in traffic that can help you come up with an instant promotional offer to help boost your conversion rate.

The possibilities are endless!
It could be anything. Once you have identified a crucial factor that was making your customers leave. Instantly fix it and shoot out an apology email to get them back.

See Which Online Campaign Brings Traffic

Got some PR or launching some online campaign, real-time analytics will help you identify which campaign or referral source is bringing in more traffic.

Marketing is key for the survival of any online business. You are probably going to be running multiple promotional and seasonal campaigns. How do you monitor the success metrics of a particular campaign?

Your regular google analytics can probably show you the goal conversion, but we don't know how much of potential conversion we are missing out.

How can Real-Time analytics help?
It can show you which campaign brings in most people and how many of them convert. You can shortlist which medium and social media websites work best for you and optimize your future campaigns based on it. Now you know exactly where to spend your marketing budget to get maximum conversion.

Understand A/B/n Testing Results For Better Conversions

Finally, we come to the most anticipated part - The A/B/n testing otherwise called the split testing. We keep hearing about this everywhere, we need to test to understand our success metrics about all our campaigns.

But, even if we run these tests, the real-time analysis is the actual hero that helps you map out which layout/content works best.

How can Real-Time analytics help?
With A/B testing, we split the landing page into two different layouts and showcase it to a different set of audience. We monitor the behavior of the audience real time to evaluate the percentage of their conversion rate, then we come to the decision of choosing A over B or vice versa.

Plan Your Website's Downtime

Websites need to have regular maintenance and security updates to ensure it doesn't crash during your peak sale hour. The downtime could range between few minutes to a few hours, but since most eCommerce websites cater to the global audience, it's next to impossible to schedule a downtime that favors shoppers.

How can Real-Time analytics help?
You can clearly identify the time when there is minimal footfall and make use of this data to schedule all your back-end maintenance work. You not only reduce the risk of losing potential customers, but don't lose out on your precious conversions.

If you haven't been harnessing the power of real-time analytics, this list should have convinced you to at least give it a try. The only thing you need to be cautious is that you have enough data points to draw a pattern and act upon it. Once you have mastered reading real-time analytics and acting upon it, you can easily improve your conversion rate!