8 Must Have Ecommerce Analytics Tools

The best ecommerce analytics tools are an incredible resource for online business owners. The top solutions in the market can help you dive into critical data about your store’s performance, customers, and even your products, paving the way to more intelligent decisions for growth.

Ideal for beginners and veterans in the ecommerce landscape alike, analytical tools can show you exactly what you need to do to enhance customer experiences, increasing total lifetime value, average order value, and loyalty.

They can also give you data-driven hints into which products you should be selling, how you can boost your sales, and even how to reduce operating costs.

Today, we’re taking a closer look at some of the most valuable ecommerce tools proven to drive measurable results for online store owners. We’ll be examining the pros and cons of the top solutions, and showing you how you can select the right tools for your business.

Key Takeaways

• Ecommerce analytics tools are valuable resources, allowing companies to capture and understand critical data about their customers, products, and store performance.
• The right ecommerce analytics tools will help you to increase and optimize sales, reduce cart abandonment, and improve the customer journey.
• Different analytical tools focus on different types of data, from customer journey mapping tools to solutions for understanding the impact of your marketing campaigns.
• Leading analytical tools will draw data from a range of environments, including your ecommerce platforms, and marketing tools, for more holistic insights.
• While there are free ecommerce analytical tools available, most are limited in their feature sets. You may need to consider upgrading to a premium tool over time.
• Ecommerce analytical tools are becoming more advanced, with the rise of more intuitive automation technology and artificial intelligence.

When to Use Ecommerce Analytics Tools?

Ecommerce analytics is the process of gathering, and assessing data from your online store, to ensure you can make intelligent decisions for growth. Every store is packed with insights into everything from customer preferences and behaviors to product, marketing, and sales strategy performance.

Ecommerce analytics tools allow you to effectively collect that data, and sort through the noise, drawing actionable insights from raw information. It’s how business leaders in the ecommerce space make the right decisions about how they can improve customer experiences, and optimize growth.

Analytical tools come with a range of features for collecting, monitoring, and assessing data, reducing the strain on business leaders to find and evaluate raw data manually. Some ecommerce platforms, like Shopify and WooCommerce, even have their own dedicated internal and third-party analytical tools, specially tuned to the features of the platforms.

These powerful tools can help you segment your audience more effectively, for personalized sales and marketing campaigns, and improve customer experience. They also give you insights into strategies for growing sales and unlocking new revenue.

The Types of Ecommerce Analytics Tools

Since there are different types of data companies can access in the ecommerce world, there are also different kinds of ecommerce analytics tools used for assessing this data. Some of the most common types of ecommerce analytics tools include:

• Marketing analytical tools: Ecommerce analytics tools like Google Analytics give you a valuable way to determine where traffic is coming to your business, and how people behave on your store, so you can design more effective marketing campaigns.
• Product analysis tools: Tools for product analytics help you identify your top-performing products, and customer shopping behaviors, so you can decide which items to promote and invest in, as well as where to run sales and promotional campaigns.
• Behavior analytics tools: Behavioral analytics tools look at the behaviors of shoppers on your website, and through their marketing journey. For instance, Hotjar allows you to track customer behaviors through session recordings and heatmaps.
• Search engine optimization tools: SEO tools give you opportunities to examine which keywords customers in your industry might be searching for, so you can optimize product, landing, and website pages for specific terms.
• Financial analysis tools: Financial analytical tools look at things like how much it costs to acquire a customer (Customer Acquisition Cost), how much an average customer spends, and how much profit you can expect to make from different products.

The Top Ecommerce Analytics Tools: Reviewed

Using our experience as ecommerce growth consultants, as well as hands-on experiments with some of the most popular solutions for ecommerce analytics, we’ve created this list of the most powerful solutions for online vendors. Here are our top picks:

1. Kissmetrics

Best for: Customer journey tracking and analysis.

Premium analytics solution for ecommerce vendors and business leaders, Kissmetrics is a sophisticated tool that allows you to track everything from the average revenue per customer, to the visitor-to-purchase conversion rate of your store.

You can use Kissmetrics to grow your ecommerce store by looking at crucial metrics like average order value, total sales, and more. You can even:

• Learn how to optimize email campaigns with A/B testing.
• Reduce website bounce rate with notifications and pop-up boxes.
• Segment data into cohorts to find out what different groups have in common
• Track the behavior of individual customers throughout the buying journey

Pricing

As a premium customer analytics tool, Kissmetrics is a little more expensive than some alternatives. Prices start at $25.99 per month for monitoring up to 10 events. Alternatively, there are packages starting at $199 per month for small teams, as well as a pay-as-you-go option where you pay for each individual “event” you monitor.

Pros

• In-depth insights into customer journeys
• Powerful A/B testing tools
• Comprehensive range of reports
• Wide range of pricing plans

Cons

• Expensive for smaller teams, with no free trial
• Slight learning curve for beginners

2. Google Analytics

Best for: Small companies conducting traffic and keyword analysis

Perhaps the most popular ecommerce analytics tool, particularly among smaller, budget-conscious teams, Google Analytics is a free data analysis solution. It offers a wide range of actionable insights into traffic sources and marketing strategy results.

Google Analytics also has an Enhanced Ecommerce offering that gives business owners in the online shopping world more advanced overviews of critical statistics. You can use it to:

• Measure traffic sources and volume to see if marketing strategies are working.
• Analyze customer engagements and page bounce rates.
• Track ecommerce metrics like lifetime value and conversion events

Pricing

Google Analytics is free to use, making it one of the first ecommerce analytical tools most businesses use when starting their online store.

Pros

• Free service, ideal for budget-conscious beginners
• Powerful insights into ecommerce metrics
• Excellent traffic analysis capabilities
• Integrations with various ecommerce platforms

Cons

• Slightly complex setup for first-time users
• Limited “in-depth” analytics

3. Hotjar

Best for: Insights into customer behavior on your store.

Hotjar is a powerful and intuitive platform that combines traditional ecommerce analytics with insights into user behavior, via heatmaps and session recordings. The digital experience platform is used on over 1 million websites worldwide, and there’s a forever free plan.

With Hotjar, you’ll get granular insights into what customers do when they visit your ecommerce store, helping you to optimize the customer journey. Companies can:

• Use heatmaps to visualize how visitors move through your store.
• Record individual browsing and purchasing sessions for deeper insights.
• Conduct surveys and collect feedback from customers automatically.

Pricing

There’s a free forever plan for Hotjar, which includes access to unlimited heatmaps, dashboards, page view filters and integrations for up to 5,000 sessions per month. The paid plans, which include access to more data storage, and intelligent filters start at $39 per month.

Pros:

• Unlimited heatmaps and dashboards on every plan
• Powerful integrations with leading ecommerce platforms
• Comprehensive journey tracking capabilities
• Easy to understand visual reports

Cons:

• No integration with Google Analytics
• May be slightly confusing for beginners

4. WooCommerce Analytics

Best for: WordPress users looking for sales analytics.

Specially designed for WordPress users leveraging WooCommerce for ecommerce capabilities, WooCommerce is a free and open-source reporting and data analysis tools. Used by more than 7 million companies worldwide, the solution focuses exclusively on sales analytics.

With WooCommerce Analytics, companies can leverage a customizable dashboard to track important metrics, and view a range of reports within a unified dashboard. You can use WooCommerce Analytics to grow your online store by:

• Visualizing and downloading basic reports on products, revenues, and stock.
• Accessing a real-time dashboard for critical metrics.
• Filtering customers by segment for more granular insights

Pricing

As an open-source solution for WooCommerce, this platform is free to use. However, it does have some limitations on reporting compared to other premium services.

Pros:

• Free to use with no monthly fees
• Insightful dashboard with rapid metric updates
• Filtering and segmentation options
• Lots of pre-built reports for revenue, products and more

Cons:

• No tools for behavior or journey tracking
• Only suitable for WordPress users

5. Mixpanel

Best for: Product analytics and customer insights in one.

Mixpanel is another extremely popular solution among ecommerce analytics tools, with a free plan for up to 20 million events per month. The platform collects data on a range of customer touchpoints, helping business leaders understand how each interaction influences sales and revenue.

With Mixpanel, you can leverage insights from not just your ecommerce platform, but also other marketing channels and analytical platforms, such as Hotjar. Plus, there are tons of templates for reports and dashboards to help you dive in instantly. You can use Mixpanel to:

• Visualize important product analytics and customer insights.
• Create custom and interactive reports for a variety of metrics.
• Track ecommerce metrics like add-to-cart conversions and product views.
• Build custom funnels to identify potential drop-offs and reasons for lost sales.

Pricing

Mixpanel offers beginners a generous free plan, which supports analysis for up to 200 events per month, and a wide range of report types. You also get unlimited collaborators and integrations with other tools. Paid plans start at $20 per month, for more saved reports, no-code data transformations, advanced sharing controls, and group analytics.

Pros:

• Generous free plan for beginners
• Straightforward templates for new businesses
• Automated provisioning and SSO options
• Premium support for some plans

Cons:

• Limited data storage on the free plan
• Advanced data governance only on the enterprise plan

6. Supermetrics

Best for: Integrating various forms of data into visualization tools like Google Sheets.

Great for companies looking to combine data insights from multiple environments into a single platforms, Supermetrics give you a way to holistically understand your data. You can seamlessly import all of your ecommerce data into the platform, then display actionable insights in customizable reports, and a range of formats, such as Google Sheets.

Supermetrics can leverage data from your ecommerce platform or marketplace, email tools, SEO tools, and more, so you can make more intelligent decisions for growth. The straightforward solution allows businesses to:

• Determine which marketing campaigns contribute to revenue.
• Set up automated workflows for sales and marketing campaigns.
• Align data from multiple different environments and touchpoints.
• Access real-time insights and regular reports on top metrics.

Pricing

The pricing structure for Supermetrics can be a little difficult to understand, as the amount you pay depends on how you want to “view” your data. For instance, if you’re importing all of your data into Google Sheets, you’ll pay $69 per month for Supermetrics. Other solutions like Monday.com start at $19 per month, while some options have custom pricing, so you’ll need to contact the team.

Pros:

• Easy to combine all of your data in one place
• Comprehensive reports and dashboards
• Intelligent automated workflows
• Free trial for beginners

Cons:

• Slightly complicated pricing structure
• No data storage options

7. Woopra

Best for: Detailed live updates on store success and user metrics.

Woopra is a customer journey and product analytics toolkit that helps companies understand their customer’s behavior and activities in a range of environments. The tool helps organizations reduce their average abandonment rate for shopping carts, and increase retention with journey reports.

While functionality varies depending on the plan you choose, Woopra’s comprehensive solution is ideal for understanding exactly which touchpoints are most crucial to upgrading your revenue and unlocking new sales opportunities. You can use Woopra to:

• See how long it takes for customers to purchase a product.
• Track abandoned cart metrics and define “bounce” issues.
• Analyze each part of the sales journey individually.
• Create and track custom reports.

Pricing

Woopra has a free plan available for beginners, which supports up to 500 actions per month, with 90-day data retention, 30+ integrations, and core analytics. Paid prices, which give you 5 milliona ctions per month or more, as well as drill-down reporting and automations start at $999 per month.

Pros:

• Excellent end-to-end customer journey reporting
• Powerful automation capabilities
• Integrations with a wide range of business tools
• Free plan for beginners

Cons:

• Expensive paid plans
• Complicated setup

8. Lucky Orange

Best for: Data analytics and live chat functionality.

One of the top ecommerce analytics tools, Lucky Orange combines data analytics with journey mapping capabilities and dynamic heatmaps. The all-in-one ecosystem is packed with useful features like session recordings, dashboard insights, and visitor profiles. Plus, it allows you to leverage live chat capabilities and surveys to collect genuine customer feedback.

Every plan for Lucky Orange also includes support for unlimited team members, so you can work with your colleagues on data analysis. Plus, the system integrates with a wide range of existing business tools, from Shopify to HubSpot. With Lucky Orange you can:

• Connect with customers through surveys and live chat.
• Access comprehensive session recordings and dynamic heatmaps
• Build visitor profiles and journey maps.
• Track metrics in real-time with instant notifications

Pricing

Lucky Orange’s free plan only offers insights into up to 100 sessions per month, but it does come with one month of data storage. Paid plans start at $39 per month, with support for 5000+ sessions per month and more data storage. All plans come with an extensive range of reporting features.

Pros

• Live chat, surveys, and data analysis in one
• Dynamic heatmaps and session recordings
• Unlimited collaborators on all plans
• Extensive data integrations

Cons

• Pricing might be expensive for scaling businesses
• Extra costs for additional websites and storage

How to Choose the Right Ecommerce Analytics Tool

Finding the right ecommerce analytics tool for your business means defining which information you need to collect, and which features you need to unlock the best results. Some of the key points you should consider when assessing the tools above include:

• Feature requirements: Consider which specific features you’ll need for data analysis, such as heatmaps, journey mapping capabilities, customer profiles, automation, and custom reports or dashboards for ecommerce metrics.
• Budget: Some of the solutions above are free to use, while others offer free plans. The less you pay for your ecommerce analytics tool, the more likely you are to have fewer features and capabilities available.
• Scale: The scale of your ecommerce operation will determine exactly how many sessions you need to monitor, how much data you’ll be collecting and storing, and which tools you’ll need your analytics system to integrate with.
• User experience: Ideally, your analytics tool should be easy to use, with straightforward dashboards and pre-built reporting templates. You may also need to consider looking for a solution with exceptional customer support.

Recommendations Based on Business Sizes and Needs

Beginners in the ecommerce world will have different requirements to larger ecommerce companies. If you’re just getting started, it makes sense to start with free tools, like Google Analytics, or WooCommerce Analytics for ecommerce stores.

As your business grows, you may need more advanced solutions like Mixpanel, for in-depth journey insights, Kissmetrics for comprehensive customer journey tracking, or Hotjar, if you want to see how customers are behaving on your website.

You may also want to consider leveraging solutions like Supermetrics, to ensure you can collect multiple forms of data from different environments and embed them into a single platform. This will give you a more holistic view of your ecommerce data, so you can make more granular decisions.

Keep in mind, many premium analytics tools will offer a range of plans with different features and capabilities, so you can scale your solution as your business evolves.

How to Use Analytics for Ecommerce Growth

Comprehensive ecommerce analytics tools will give you a range of features you can use to take your business performance to the next level. You can use solutions to boost your conversion rates, increase customer loyalty, and enhance average order value. Here are some top tips for success:

• Track the customer journey carefully: Tools like Hotjar and Kissmetrics are excellent for understanding the various touchpoints in your customer’s journey. With the right tools, you can examine how customers interact with different parts of your website, making it easier to place offers and CTAs in the right places on your pages.
• Optimize your marketing strategies: Google Analytics, as well as search engine optimization tools, can give you behind-the-scenes insights into how to build comprehensive marketing campaigns for different segments of your audience. These tools will help to reduce your cost per acquisition for customers, and increase marketing ROI.
• Segment your audience: Use the insights you gain into your target audience to segment them into specific groups. This will help you to build sales funnels, offers, and marketing strategies that appeal to the specific needs and expectations of different customers.
• Enhance user experience: Leverage analytical tools to boost the customer experience on your store. Look for ways to eliminate friction points in the customer journey, or deliver personalized recommendations to each user based on their browsing behavior.
• Constantly test and experiment: Using analytical tools, you can leverage data to build more comprehensive A/B tests and experiments. This will help you to understand exactly which campaigns and strategies are having a positive impact on your conversion rates.

Remember, if you have any issues with your ecommerce analytics strategy, you might find it’s also helpful to work with a dedicated data analysis or ecommerce growth consultancy.

The Future of Ecommerce Analytics

As competition grows in the ecommerce landscape, companies are becoming increasingly dependent on analytical tools to help them make data-driven decisions. Over time, these tools are becoming more advanced, user-friendly, and intuitive.

Some companies are investing in artificial intelligence, to help with things like surfacing actionable insights from unstructured data, without the need for a data scientist. Others leverage automation features to help you track and monitor crucial metrics in real-time, so you can make rapid decisions that boost your conversion rates over time.

Additionally, many ecommerce analytics tools today also come with highly customizable features, allowing you to build reports and dashboards that specifically focus on the metrics and KPIs that matter most to your organization.

Ecommerce Analytics Tools: Finishing Thoughts

Accessing the right ecommerce analytics tools is crucial to ensuring you can make intelligent decisions about the future of your online store. The more information you collect from your analytical tools, the more you can reduce customer acquisition costs and increase revenue.

Remember, as your business evolves, you may choose to use multiple ecommerce analytics tools simultaneously, boosting your chances of gaining more granular insights into product and sales strategy performance, and customer experience.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)