If you do any amount of your business online, you understand the need to know what gains traction with your customers online. The necessity of having good analytics for your web traffic
is more important than ever.
So, you’ve likely spent time debating what company to utilize to track your E-commerce. This article is an attempt to suggest things to consider when researching E-commerce tracking companies.
Check the price structure
While you may be tempted to use a free service like Google Analytics, understand that many features (things like robust customer service, up-to-the-minute data, and review of more than 20 data points) are locked behind a $150,000 paywall. If you aren’t planning on expanding your business much, a free service may be acceptable; if you are a giant, multi-national corporation, the $150,000 for Google Analytics 360 may not be prohibitive in cost.
If you are in between these two, however, you may want to consider choosing a company whose specialty is E-commerce tracking. Some companies that provide E-commerce tracking have plans that begin as low as $299.00 per month. While this is more than $0.00, these smaller companies will also likely offer a more robust and effective customer service team than a large conglomerate like Google can offer.
Most companies do not offer the flat fee that Google Analytics does, instead, they usually rely on a pricing structure that may alter depending on how much data you need to analyze.
While it may be irritating to not know how much you will pay your analytics company for their services, think of it in the same vein as a utility; with a utility, you pay depending on how much you use within a month. For example, if your website specializes in electronics, you may see an uptick in traffic around the holiday season.
As far as how much to expect to spend, a good start is to spend 1 percent of your media budget on analytics. This isn’t a perfect ratio, of course; smaller companies will likely want to spend more to get some idea of their strengths and weaknesses, while larger, more established companies may spend less. However, 1 percent is a good start.
Determine what you want from E-commerce tracking
All the analytics in the world mean nothing if you don’t know what you’re seeing, or what you want to glean from the data. Be willing to do the research to understand how analytics work, and what you can determine from certain information.
Most analytics companies will offer some sort of tutorial on how to use their products efficiently; spend the time to review these tutorials so that you aren’t simply left in the weeds with a bunch of data you can’t use.
As most analytics also allow you to customize what data you receive, you should consider what data is most important to you. For example, if determining how many subscribers you receive (or lose) for a service is important, analytic companies can often keep tabs on that.
If your company wants to keep tabs on how your customers continually interact with you, or when they stop interacting with you, a smaller company specializing in E-commerce tracking will be more likely to see those individual interactions than a larger company that just provides large blocks of data.
It’s important that you consider a cross-section of data that will tell you a complete story; instead of just having a bunch of random numbers, like how many people visited a certain part of your site, you will want comprehensive data about when your customers leave, when they subscribe (or unsubscribe) to your services, and what makes them click away from your site.
Remember that you should experience good customer service, too
As a business owner, you likely understand the value of customer service. So, when dealing with an analytics company, you should expect that said company will offer good customer service as you do.
Reading reviews helps you to gauge the strength of a company’s customer service. While you should read a large cross-section of reviews, pay close attention to the ratings between 2 and 4 stars, as these are generally honest reviews that will let you know a company’s downfalls, and will show you how said company interacts with customers when the services go awry.
A reminder: Google Analytics’ free option does not allow for customer service beyond e-mails, while their service that offers personalized customer service costs $150,000.