It’s becoming more and more critical for e-commerce merchants to understand how their business is functioning and tracking beyond one website. Many merchants now have staff members looking to compile tracking and reporting information from a number of resources – even in cases where they have Google Analytics tightly integrated. Furthermore, the aggregation and analysis of multiple sources of business information is very important to making it actionable. Most know how long it takes to put together a report from GA, the backend of Magento, and 5 other sources. It takes a long time. When we consider that the main point of data analysis is to make informed decisions quickly to move the needle on our bottom line, getting a report days after we needed it can often render the information redundant.
There are a number of tools that can help to synthesize and simplify reporting for e-commerce but the best for Magento merchants is the one that is already integrated into the Magento suite: Magento Business Intelligence (BI).
What is Magento Business Intelligence?
To quote Magento:
“Magento Business Intelligence (Magento BI) is a cloud-based data management and analytics platform. Magento BI provides users with the ability to easily consolidate and manage their data sources, model their data, create charts and reports, and maintain a single source of truth.”
Given how e-commerce is now comprised of more and more disparate systems that are connected through various integrations, that last point is becoming increasingly important.
Indeed, Google Analytics can answer important questions, such as:
- What is my e-commerce conversion rate?
- What is my bounce rate?
- What is my average order value this month?
- What is my most popular product viewed?
- Home many website visitors did my campaign drive by channel?
However, it CAN’T answer more prudent questions like:
- What is the lifetime value of my customers that buy X versus Y?
- What is the difference in my company revenues by customer, product and geolocation?
- How have my top 5 e-commerce metrics changed month-to-month in the last 6 months?
- What were refunds collected and shipping $ collected in the last month?
- What is the number of orders, revenue, and average order value by Customer ID?
See the difference? Magento BI does answer the latter questions, and does all the work that you or your analysts would otherwise have had to do manually.
3 reasons to stop relying on just Google Analytics
1. Google Analytics Only Provides a Thin Slice of the Information You Need
Google Analytics looks at the website as a channel. It’s true that there are tons of great integrations available but it’s complex and most of the integrations focus on the slice of business that comes from other digital channels and inside your website. Now that e-commerce permeates every part of a merchant’s operation it’s even more important to understand how all channels interact and work with each other.
Additionally, as referenced above, unless you put in a lot of custom work up front, Google Analytics will only show you the basic data points. Sophisticated merchants need sophisticated data and Google analytics, amazing as it is, doesn’t typically provide that.
2. It’s Either Very Cheap or FREE
You may not have even known that as a valued Magento Cloud customer you get BI for free.
If you’re a smaller merchant still hanging on to CE you can get BI Essentials – a less robust but still powerful tool compared to the Advanced Analytics package – for a very small cost. Find out if you can get it for free, here.
What better reason to try it out than really having nothing to lose?
3. It’s a Great Way to Break Down Department Silos
For years (maybe decades) Google Analytics has been like a secret window into the world of the “webâ€, “digital†or “e-commerce†department. Those siloed departments shouldn’t exist anymore and any remaining silos of responsibility can learn how to work together by looking at reports and specific metrics that impact across the enterprise.
Complete with unlimited dashboards, data visualizations and built in report generators, you have the option to look at out of the box insights or customize them against your specific business metrics. BI is a way to share critical information that enables you to work together – e-commerce website manager with content manager with warehouse manager – it’s a great way to bridge the communication gaps.
The Bottom Line
If your e-commerce website is on Magento and you’re not already using data to inform your decisions, or if you are but have found the insights from tools like Google Analytics are too limited, there are a number of reasons to consider getting setup on Magento Business Intelligence.
Our team of Magento and e-commerce experts are always excited to talk about how we can turn your data into value. Get in touch to discuss how we can use Business Intelligence to drive your intelligent business.
