How to use your business data that is generated by your customer's online shopping

What is Business Data in E-commerce? 

Business data is a collection of values or a unique value which fit exactly in your strategic formula and help you predict positive/negative growth.  

The primary source of business data is customer interaction with your website, and it can be leveraged in infinite ways. For example, measuring customer hits on specific categories and products. From these hit counts, you can create your own home-grown organic algorithm for displaying trending category/product lists on your website. This will measure the good and bad performing content on your specific URL which is triggering customers to abandon your website. 

One of many crucial secondary sources is measuring paid traffic, which will help you to anticipate whether you are getting expedited returns. 

Why are we saying don’t waste business data?

Being in the E-Commerce space, we have seen and experienced many ways in which an e-commerce shop waste business data.  

3 major ways in which E-commerce shop waste business data

1. Utilizing the data gathered to create reports and develop innovative features.

2. Non-standard technical hacks lead to wrong augmentation of business data values.

3. Unawareness and less enthusiasm to test, test, and test.

Innovation quotient of business data is not valued as much as its reporting quotient

What happened once we got the requirement to build technical solution to measure number of customers hit specific product or category on our website. We didn’t limit ourselves from helping our client to measure and build custom report over it, but we also help our client to store this number of hits in database and created the top 10 trending products/categories list based on respective highest numbers of hit counts and displayed that list in dropdown of search box which is shown when we focus in search field.

Non-standard technical hacks lead to wrong augmentation of business data values 

One of our clients who was having fully integrated Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager Setup, was facing faulty bounce rate issue. Bounce rate means percentage of customers who enter the website and then leave. How it was declared faulty? by seeing previous and current history of bounce rate report.  

While debugging problem we found out that pageview event proprietary to google Analytics is being triggered in recursion via google tag manager and its impacting other events invocation. We fixed this technical anomaly and got Bounce rate measurement up and running again.

Unawareness and less enthusiasm to test, test and test.

To understand this point, we will share one scenario which was faced by our client that was related to UTM parameters which were not attributing correct utm_source value in google analytics dashboard. 

Expected behaviour is whenever user search keyword > click on that keyword > user will be redirected to client website and along with this redirection, utm_source will send domain name of website on which search widget is hosted to google analytics dashboard. 

But instead it was sending random encrypted domain name.

Root cause was because of a security feature within Google Ad Manager, called Safeframe.The Safeframe was wrapping search widget in iframe and setting src attribute on iframe to any dynamic domain name. Hence to overcome this we had to do some customization in programming code and ensure that correct domain name is attributed in Google Analytics Dashboard. Correcting this issue was crucial for our client because they were paying third parties for hosting their search widget extension and this issue was preventing them to measure their return on investment.

We have many such cases which are being faced by us every day while making our ecommerce client grow consistently and exponentially. Kindly let us know if you like to discuss and suggest us anything new in E-commerce Business Data.