Transcripts
1. 1. Intro: What is the best reporting
system for e-commerce stores? That is a question that
I'm going to answer. And I want to share
with you what the best reporting
system is and help you build up to the point where you have the best system
for your store as well. Hi, I'm Jeff Sauer and I'm somebody who's
been involved with e-commerce from a
reporting perspective for over 15 years. I helped manage a store
for a Fortune 20 company, an online store where we sold all kinds of
different products, grew by millions of
dollars every single year. And I was the primary person
in charge of reporting, analytics, measuring
things like advertising, and helping set the
company's strategy. And this is something
that I was in the trenches in doing. Since then, since I
moved on from that role, I've been working with
other e-commerce stores to help them understand
what data is at their disposal so they can
make better decisions and find more customers and become more
profitable as a business. When I want to say here
is that it doesn't matter where you're at
right now with reporting. If you've never run
a report before or if you just
started your store, or if you have an
established store, you are going to
learn something in this course that's going
to help you better put into perspective what you can do with everything
available to you. And the reason why is because every level of
experience you have, every single problem
that you solve creates another opportunity in
every opportunity is something that if we have
the right metrics, KPIs, and understanding around what that
opportunity represents, we can use that in order to get better results when
it comes down to it, the best reporting system
for any e-commerce store is really the system
that you use, okay? Because no one software has every single thing that
you need in one place. And here's why. Because an e-commerce
software, for example, is not going to know
what traffic went to your site in the same
way that Google is, which is the major
traffic driving platform. They're not going
to know what type of advertising you're spending because they're not necessarily hooked into your ad platforms. There's a lot of
different places out there to draw traffic
to your site. There's a lot of
different techniques. There's tons of different
types of products, physical products,
digital products. There's so many different
variables in place that any one system is
never gonna be perfect. The system that you
end up developing for yourself or for your opinion, is the one that's
going to give you the best results overall. And it's funny when I say this because it really does
start to make sense. If you're a beginner
e-commerce store, the number one
report and you only report that matters to
you and say that you set up something on Shopify is showing that you had
a sale in Shopify. That's the only
place you need to go because you want to make
sure that you have sales. There's no need to
start setting up crazy ad campaigns or even Google Analytics if you've
never made a sale before. But as soon as you start getting some sales coming
into your company, you are going to
want to say, Okay, well how do I get more of that? And that's where these
other platforms working in concert with each
other come into place. So throughout this
entire training, we're gonna go through strengths and weaknesses
of each platform. We're gonna be talking
about building this perfect e-commerce
reporting system. And everything that
we talk about here is gonna be very achievable in graspable for your business
depending on where you are. If you're not very
far along yet, the beginning parts are gonna be really helpful and really useful for you because it helps validate what you look at. It's the things that
I looked at for the entire eight years that I grew this e-commerce business. Also, not only that, but it's going to
help you understand where the future is going to go. Now if you've been
doing this for awhile, if your company is very
advanced with e-commerce, you are still going to
find KPIs that might be important to you
because obviously, not every single system, not every single technique is readily available to us until
we know that we need it. And so you might trigger and watching this video that
there's a technique that's gonna be
really helpful for you that we're gonna be talking about a little bit later
on in this process. And that's why I'm
so excited for this series of videos
because I'm going to show you exactly what goes into
creating that perfect system, strengths and weaknesses
of each platform and a lot more as it
comes to reporting. Now I'm going to end this video with a controversial opinion. And that is this, that if you invested billions
or even trillions of dollars in venture
capital money into building the perfect
reporting system. Nobody would use it. And the reason why is because the perfect piece of
software doesn't exist because you really need to
combine specialty metrics, different platforms,
different systems in order to get the
right system for you. And so even though we aspire to have
everything in one place, it's never going to
be there perfectly. However, if you know from what I teach
and if you've ever taken something
from data-driven, a lot of the consolidation, a lot of the perfection
comes from taking from these different areas
and making yourself more efficient by automating
the way you pull in data, by building out
dashboards and by having this all aligned to the
KPIs for your business. And so a big important piece
here of being successful is knowing what the definition of successes for your business. And finally, be sure to
download our workbook, which is over 30 pages that you have and you
can use it in order to follow along with this course and use it as a way to
make sure that you're keeping track of
everything we're talking about inside this course.
2. 2. Components of a Perfect Ecommerce System: Okay, Let's talk about
the components of your perfect e-commerce system. And I'm going to start
with a quote from yours. Truly, successful e-commerce
stores our data agnostic. They don't care where
the data comes from, just what it represents
to grow their business. And that's because not every platform has
access to the same data. You need to pull in data
from several sources in order to get
the best metrics, the best data possible. And that includes data from
four different sources. So let me talk about what these four sources are
and what they represent. Number one is KPIs from your company's strategy
and objectives. Okay, let's start talking about the typical e-commerce journey. Usually what ends up happening is somebody has an idea for a product or an idea for how they can serve
a market need, a need for a product
or a need for somebody to have a good to
solve a problem. So if you want to
solve the problem through funny t-shirts, there you go, That's a
knee that you're solving. If you want to solve a
problem for household goods, that's another need
you're solving. Most things end up solving a problem in the
form of a product, especially when we're talking
about physical e-commerce. Okay, so we all start
out in the same way. Some of us realize that, yes, while the product is good, standing out in a crowd is difficult if you don't
do proper marketing. And so this all comes together. And the first step
is to say I have a product to source a
product and then to sell it. Now you sell it through
an e-commerce software. So you install something on your website or use
a hosted solution. And they help you make sure
that you're selling things. They take the credit
card payments, they help you even with shipping and other logistical issues. That's basically the,
pretty much the standard journey of starting
an e-commerce store. Now the stores that
start to succeed and take things to
the next level are those that understand that marketing is important
to not only that, but they need to keep on sourcing product having the
right inventory on hand. They need to do all these
different items in order to make sure that they
are making money. And they can take
their side hustle and turn it into a
primary business, or they can build more products, they can source new things. And so there's really no
limit once you start getting that initial traction as to where you may
take the business. But what ends up happening oftentimes is that accompany
they have this idea. They want to start a product
and then they start it. And they're just happy to say, okay, we sold a few units, we sold a few, but they
don't really put it together as a plan for how
they're going to get more. Simply put, for number one, they don't really set
company objectives. They're not really sure what their company is there an even sure that their product
is accompany yet, that can be a challenge. But as a company or a business matures and they want
to do this repeatedly. They want to flatten
their revenue curves so they're getting paid
money every single month, so they're not having a lot
of customers one month, no customers the next month. So they can have
consistency with inventory. They start to plan out strategies and objectives
for their business. They start to do the
real business stuff. Once they start to get a
certain amount of traction. When it comes to the components of a perfect e-commerce system. One of them is the
strategy of your company. Now it's funny, I'm listing
this as number one as the first priority that
we're talking about. But you'll find that
there are a lot of companies that do this last, because it is hard,
It is hard to do. It is hard to admit that your side hustle is now
your primary vocation. It's your huge business, something you need
to pay attention to. And oftentimes we come from a position of either
product or marketing. So we know that creating a product is important
to me, love the product, but we never really thought
about how we are going to project the finances
of our business. Part of maturing is
realizing that this is no longer just a cool
product or a side hustle. This is no longer just
an experiment and marketing of some product to see if you can differentiate. It's a business, it's
a complete business. And that's why
it's so hard to do because it takes a
mentality shift. But it's my number one component because it's very important. Everything else that I talk about in this workshop is going to trickle down from this
one piece of information. So don't worry if you don't
know what this thing means, we don't know what
any of these things I'm talking about are. I'm gonna go through them in
depth in upcoming videos. So if this doesn't make sense
yet, don't worry about it. We're going to talk
about it more in our upcoming lesson videos. Okay, now it's time to talk with the number two components
of the system, and that is reports from
your e-commerce software. Now, going back to the story, the journey of somebody in e-commerce getting sales as
your number one priority. Because if you don't
get any sales, you don't have any money. And if you want any money,
you can't hire people. You can't put any money
into advertising. You're basically
saying we need to have some kind of
indicator of success. We need product and market
fit in order to move forward. So the first place that
we're going to find out success beyond our bank account once money starts
getting deposited, when somebody buys from us
is our e-commerce software. And e-commerce software is great for the reports
they provide. They tell you what
products sold. They tell you the categories
of products that sold. Not only that, but they tell you your relationship with a user. They tell you how
many users ordered. They tell you one specific user, how many products that
they order and how often are they ordered or
they have loyal customers. You can find all that data and more inside your
e-commerce software. So this is a vital component
of vital building block for what you wanna do moving forward with e-commerce
measurement. Now, of course, it's a building block and
you might wonder, well, isn't that all we need? Isn't that all we need is to
look at reports and Shopify. To pull some reports from our WooCommerce store
and we're good to go. Well, it's not that easy. And the reason why is because
Shopify only has access to so much data and they only know so much they know
what products sold, but they don't know what your
company's objectives are. Of course, why would Shopify know what your objectives are? And obviously they're trying to give an experience where they make sure that people on a mobile device or on
desktop have the easiest, most frictionless processed
from buying from you. They obviously have to make an assumption that your
products are desirable and that you're driving people to
them because they can't do that for every single
person on their platform. Shopify doesn't know what
your objectives are. They don't know what
success looks like for you. They just know how to
tell you what you've done and where success is, or what you've,
what you've done to date and how much money
you have coming in. So it's a building block, it's a major building block, but it does have
several blind spots and that's why we need to move
on to the next one in order to continue to establish our ideal reporting system and figure out what
the components are. And that leads me to the next building
block number three, which is reports from
Google Analytics. Now I am known as the GA
guy all over the world. I love Google Analytics more
than anybody I've ever met, and I've talked about it
in 20 different countries. I've had millions of people read my blog post and watch
my YouTube videos. I love talking
about GA, trust me. The reason why is because
it fills in a lot of the blind spots
were talking about from our e-commerce
platform and, or from our marketing objectives that we set for our company. Now, as I mentioned, I've been doing this
for a long time. I lead an e-commerce store
for eight plus years. And in doing that, I was able to set
objectives and say, Hey, we need to get more
customers of this type. We need to get more of this, we need to do more of that. And the way that I've found
those insights was not from the shopping cart software,
it was not from there. It was from Google
Analytics because Google Analytics is
the marketer's dream, the e-commerce marketer's dream is Google Analytics because it's a consolidated reporting
system that can show you anything you want to know about the traffic
coming to your site. How do you attribute revenue to your different
marketing sources? What somebody does on your site, filling in all of your blind
spots if they don't buy and just having a pretty darn good understanding of
what you can do. So obviously, I love Google Analytics and
I'm going to share more about it in
upcoming videos as well. But before we get there, I want to move on to
part number four, the fourth component of the
perfect e-commerce system. And that is reports from your advertising platforms
and any platform that you put out there to drive traffic and interests to
your e-commerce store. Now there's something
magical about ad platforms and that
is their simplicity. Usually you just need to
put a pixel onto your site. Let the ad platform, no. What is success for you? Usually for all for
e-commerce, it's a purchase, or maybe you could even
say for your leads, but in this case I'm going
to talk about purchases. Let them know when somebody bought something
and how much they bought and they're
going to tell you the return on ad spend. They're going to tell you how successful you are and
they're gonna go out there and find more customers
for you. It works great. However, it only gives
you a certain picture. It gives you a very
biased picture towards the advertising
platform themselves. They're going to
say that they are the center of your universe. And obviously, we know
better than that. There's a few different sides to our perfect system for different components that
I'm talking about here. So instead of saying the center, there is no center,
this isn't a circle, this is a component, this is a cornerstone
of overall reporting. And so instead of thinking
that this thing is a centerpiece of
e-commerce reporting, you wanna look at it as a
corner, as a component, as a vital building
block to you being successful in
measuring advertising. And so the cool thing
about Google is that they own the largest advertising
platform in the world, in the Google ads platform, as well as Google Analytics. And so there's some
pretty tight integrations between those two platforms. And in fact, if you do
Google Analytics, great, then you will do Google
ads well as well from a reporting perspective
if you match them up. But what about Facebook ads or any other emerging ad platform? What about even
influencer marketing? Well, you can get the reports from that
system and then you can verify it with the data you
have in Google Analytics. And so there's value in every
single system you have, and that's why these
components are so important. Now in our next
series of videos, we're going to talk about
the strengths of each of these four building blocks for your company's ideal
reporting systems. So stay tuned and I'm
going to share with you the strengths of each
system in upcoming videos.
3. 3. Strengths of Your Company's Strategy for Ecommerce Reporting: Okay, in this section
I want to talk about the strengths of setting
your company's strategy. Now, obviously we have four building blocks for components of the perfect
e-commerce system. And I want to talk through them one-by-one and the
next series of videos. And I'm gonna start with the strengths of setting
your company's strategy. Let's get into these strengths. The first part is that you set the strategy for your
business, not vendors. Now if you listen to vendors, they're going to make
it sound like they are the center of the universe
for your business. They're gonna make it
sound like they're ad platform or they're tracking pixel or their
e-commerce software feature, this benefit that is the
center of the universe. We all know the center
of the universe for your business is you. It's not just you, but it's
the products you sell, the market fit that you have for those products and how you
do it over and over again. It's the processes you
have in place in order to run campaigns
consistently over time. How to make your revenue grow, how to make your
revenue consistent, how to make sure
that your customers love everything you do, reviews of your
products, testimonials, everything that you
set in your business is designed for you, not for your vendors. And so why would you let
them set your strategy? If you let vendors
set your strategy, you're setting yourself
up for failure. So the strength here
is when you get to set the strategy yourself. The reason why it's so
important, There's a second, it's you define what makes
your business successful. What makes you successful
as it top line revenue, like a vendor wants you to have people use as
a vanity metric? Or is it bottom line
profit for your business? And it's something
that's more important than either of those things. Is it growth? Is
it market share? Is it getting customers? Is it having customer loyalty? You're the one who
gets to decide that. And once you make the decision, everything else starts
to fall into line because you train
your other systems, that that's what
makes you successful. And the final point
here, number three, is that you optimize for profit and you don't have
to optimize for necessarily gross sales only. The reason why this is
important is because no other system cares
about your profit. Google Analytics does not
care about your profit. Google ads does not
care about your profit. Would they want you to be more profitable than making no money? Of course they do. They want you to make
more money than nothing, but they don't care if you make a million dollars in profit or a $1,000,100 thousand in profit or a 100
thousand in profit. They just want you to
keep on advertising facebook to same way, Shopify as a similar way too. They want more
people to convert. They want to make
it easier and more frictionless for people
to buy from your store. But they don't really know if that's going to lead
to your profit or not. They definitely price
their software in an attractive way where
it should be pretty easily profitable for
you once you sell things and backing out
the software costs. But there's so many other
things that go into selling a product than
just software costs, that profit really only
comes from your product, making it in an effective way and then selling it
in an effective way. And so it's that
balance once again between product and market. That is the name of
the game here when it comes to establishing
your success, the only people who care about
that for your businesses, your company, your
internal people, the ones who set the strategy, whether you're the
owner of the store or somebody who works on
stores or even a consultant setting that strategy first
makes everything else fall into line and it makes
everything else so much easier. Now, I'm not gonna be
one of those people who just glosses over the
fact that this is hard. This is actually very difficult. If it were easy, everyone
would be doing it. Something that
happens a little bit later in the
maturity of a store. For example, at my
data-driven store, I've always had some
overall objectives and some goals that
I had in place, but it wasn't until recently, about five years
into it that I set some official goals as
to what we wanted to do, how we wanted to manage things, because before then there
wasn't enough data. There was not enough
product market fit and define success that I could even have a projection
that was worthwhile. It's okay if it takes
a while to get here. But once you do get to the point where you're
saying I want to define the KPIs and the strategies and
objectives for my company, then everything
else gets easier. Trust me, when I say that, I want to close out
this section by saying, Don't worry about
when you've done it. The greatest time to do it was probably a couple of years ago. But the next best time is now to set the strategies
for your company.
4. 4. Strengths of Ecommerce Software Reports: Let's talk about
the strengths of your e-commerce software
reporting system. Now again, I started
off earlier saying that everybody who
goes into e-commerce, the first place you look is your e-commerce store reports because that tells you
that a sale is made. Maybe you even get an
email every time that a receipt is issued
to your customers, but that's where you look every time that
you want to see. Did you make some sales? Heck, even your bank
account doesn't have as real-time
feedback as you are e-commerce software
because sometimes it takes a while for
transactions to settle. Yeah, maybe you're
looking at your bank account for success, but your e-commerce system
is so synonymous with success in e-commerce
and reporting. This is definitely the
first place that you look. And just because it's
the first place that you look doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with it. In fact, I love the reports
from e-commerce software. I love them so much and
they're so easy and they're so accessible that I almost
take them for granted. Sometimes how vital they
are for a business. Now this is because I've
done this for a long time. And so eventually you start to get more advanced
and saying, okay, well, I know what
products are selling, how do I get more of them? So he started to answer
more marketing questions than product questions. But obviously your stores where product questions
are answered. Okay, so what are
the strengths of your e-commerce
software reports? First of all, it provides a complete and
accurate picture of every sale that you
make on your store. There are problems
from time to time, even with your ad software, things like
client-side tracking, JavaScript things
don't always work. But your trusty old
e-commerce system knows when somebody bought because
they issued a receipt, because they
collected the money, they know all that stuff
and that's the place to go for reports on your products. Not only that, but you
can also number to report on the
performance of products, categories, and promotions
for your business. You want to see how
a promotion did. And you can run a coupon
report if you want to see which product
categories are doing well, run a report
byproduct categories. And so if you want to know
what products are doing well, this can be really
useful for you, and it's not just in
your reporting software. If you're a geek like me, I would export stuff from the
reporting software and run multiple levels of
data analysis to see what products are
frequently bought together, what products are
natural upsells. That's the type of
analysis you can do once you have product level, data level, it's not
gonna be as good from GA, it's not gonna be as good
from your ad platforms. The place that you find
this data is right from your e-commerce system, right from the horse's mouth. Another reason why I love e-commerce software is
around the customer. Google Analytics is anonymous, ad tracking is anonymous. They don't actually talk about the person who bought from you. They talk about the
characteristics of people who bought from you. So you're not
actually ever knowing what customer bought from you, but with your
e-commerce software, you have a customer-centric
view of your store. You can see what customers
are buying from you, how often they buy
their lifetime value, whether or not they're
repeat purchasers are one-time purchasers. Whether people who
buy with coupons do as well as people
who buy full price, and maybe even what your average discount needs to be if you want to
retain a customer, those are all things you'll get from your e-commerce store, either directly
in the reports if a system like Shopify or
WooCommerce tells you that or you can export
the data and use either a third party tool or even a trusty old spreadsheet to do that level of analysis. And so I'm one of those
people who will geek out in a spreadsheet
and run the numbers, crunching numbers in
order to find it. And that might be
something that you're interested in doing as well. Actually, at some point in time, if you check out this space, you'll find that I
have a course on that topic as well because
it's really fun for me to do that level
of analysis and hopefully that can teach
you that part as well. The final component
and the strength of your e-commerce
software is that it can easily be exported for
advanced data analysis. I've already buried
the lead a little bit there and talked about it. But if you want to,
you can send this to a database and run a query. You can compare
this data to that. There's all kinds of
stuff you can do once you get the data
out of the system. And so that's the final
component and that's a major strength With e-commerce reporting
software that you can't find nearly as
well anywhere else. Sometimes it's not necessary
to do big exports because your company KPIs are just a few numbers that you don't really need
to put out there. Or with things like
Google Analytics, you can export data
from there as well. But that's more marketing data, more around your
marketing campaigns, whereas exporting product
data is all about your customer and your products. And that's really
important if you want to survive to the next
level for your business. And so those are
the strengths of your e-commerce system reports. But like anything, you
need a flavor enhancer. And the flavor enhancers, what I'm going to talk
about in the next video, which is your Google
Analytics reports and the strings you
can find within.
5. 5. Strengths of Google Analytics Reports: Okay, The time has
come when we're in a talk about my first true love Google Analytics and the
strengths of the reports in GA. And I must say, my wife will never watch this. She's my real true love and
my son is my true love. But Google Analytics
was there first. I knew Google Analytics
before I knew them. So we can say it's
the first one. Okay, with that out of the way, the strengths of Google
Analytics reporting are many, and they are a flavor enhancer. They make everything
else you do better. And that's why I love
it so much because it breaks up the mundane and it adds a
marketing component, which is one of the
hardest puzzles to solve in the world is marketing. How do you find a market
for your product? How did you get
product market fit? Well, you need some data. The data comes from GA. So here's the strengths
that GA does for you. First of all, it provides advanced revenue
attribution that can monitor the results of every traffic source
to your store. We thought that running
ads was really important, but it confirms the amount of revenue that
came from your ads. It confirms whether
or not people are typing in the URL onto
your site to find you, it confirms that email
marketing is you're closer, it closes more deals. It tells you all that
stuff in one place as long as you properly
feed the data into GA. So every time you send
traffic to your site, as long as you define
what the campaign is, they're going to use attribution modeling to tell you whether it's the first click that's
important to that last click. And then not only that, but you can change your attribution model
right within GA, very easily to say, Okay, well, I want to pay attention
to the customer journey and I want to give more credit
to where credit is due. And that's usually either
first click, last click, or evenly distributed
attribution. The next step is that
it accurately tracks customer path to purchase and
how they utilize your site. If you've ever
wondered, how does somebody traverse your site? What obstacles did
they get in the way? Where do they drop
off from buying? Whether or not your
pages too long, whether or not
something's happening within your page to bother them, you can find answers
to that with several components
in Google Analytics. You can do it by setting
up gold funnels, by setting up enhanced
e-commerce funnels, by just measuring the
user explorer report or any of the different
flow reports that show you how
people use your site. You can get a much more
accurate and engaging picture as to how people are using your site so you can
make improvements. Now, some of those improvements
are gonna be falling into the domain of
your E-commerce, shopping software or
your cart software. But usually you have
ability to change and to look at and to measure
components to get gains. And if you can fix any
broken things on your site, if you can fix the
user experience, that can mean a lot of gains for the same
amount of ad spending, the same amount of traffic
going to your site. And so that's another
reason why we love GA. The final strength
that I'm going to mention for GA is
that it creates countless segmentation
opportunities to analyze customer behavior. You have unlimited segmentation
opportunities within GA because you can create a
segment of whatever you want. You can say buyers
versus non-buyers. And you can do a
segment of those. You can say people who
have paid over $1000 in products over the years to people who have paid
less than 1000, people who have paid
less than a 100. And you can compare based on how many purchases they have, people who have purchased
more than once, or people who have purchased
ten or more times. How do they use your site? People who came in from
different traffic sources. You can segment that. You can say, how does
Facebook traffic do from a paid perspective from
influencer marketing traffic, when we have an influencer
promoters all the way to Google ads or organic
search or email marketing. You can segment all those
things very easily, almost limitless Lee, within GA, and it's all a few clicks. Now this is one of those
things that was a game changer for me once Google introduced that to the
product, I was like, I am hooked, I am sold if
I can run segmentation, understand how various groups
of people use this site. I can just be such
a better marketer and a better advertiser. And that's the cool
thing about this, as I mentioned during
my long time running the e-commerce store and be
in the main reporting guy. I was also the main advertiser. I got to see the synergy between all these things
working together, all these different components, they were my world. And so in the next video, I'm going to wrap
up this part by talking about the strengths of advertising platform
reports because there is some data that you can
only get in those reports. And I want to make sure
that you know what that is. So checkout our next
video where we are gonna cover the strengths
of ad platforms.
6. 6. Strengths of Advertising Platform Reports: Okay, We're going to wrap up this section by talking about the strengths of advertising
platform reports. Okay, Let's get into it.
Obviously, we're talking about ad platforms like
Facebook ads, google ads. Tiktok adds Twitter
ads, Pinterest ads, any ad platform that allows
you to pay for performance. And so if they have a
conversion pixel on their site, they allow you to track
when something happens, even if it's affiliate marketing
or influencer marketing. As long as there's a way to say we drove this
traffic through the platform and we paid for
it or we bargained for it. Here's the results. Then that system will give you some really good and vital data. The reason why it's so
important to pay attention to is because they have data
we can't get anywhere else. Again, this is the four sides, the four complete corners of having a system means
that you need to get data from these different sources
because they all have different metrics and they all have different motivations. They all have different
reasons for being, and they all want to give
you something of value, so you stick with
them, but only enough. And only if you
pull it together. The first strength of an advertising
platforms that they are optimized to maximize results. For your ad budget. There's no better way in
the world in order to say, I want to spend this
much on advertising as long as it brings
me new customers. And so every ad platform has
a various way of doing this, but they all are
based on performance. They are performance
marketing systems. And they assume that the only way you're going to
continue to work with them, the only way you're
gonna give them money is if you are successful
and they're gonna give you the tools you
need in order to make sure that you stay successful and remains accessible with
what you're doing. The next point is it ad
platforms use millions of proprietary data points to
find prospective customers, the ones who are most
likely to buy your product. Now this is not available in GA, because Google
Analytics does not have all the data that
advertising platforms have. Ad platforms for years have been putting their pixels on every
single app in the world, every website out there using third-party cookies and sharing and building these profiles. And while that's
been cracked down quite a bit in recent years, it's still something
that happens and it's still something
that's a very big part of advertising and that's how we are able to have
these data points. And so they work
like a black box. Ad platforms are a black box. They say, hey, if you want, people who look like your customers will
go find them for you. But we're not going
to tell you how. You just got to trust us. You just got to say, hey, if we can find them for you, are you willing to pay for it? There's a lot of trust that
goes into these ad platforms. But if you've run
ads long enough, you realize that that trust
is pretty well-founded. If they didn't work, if they couldn't
find any customers, then you wouldn't be
advertising anymore. So long-term
advertisers know this. Now the thing is, usually you work with a
different agency for your analytics as you do for product management
on your store, as you do for advertising, especially from an
advertising perspective. And it's really when you don't consolidate this
data, it doesn't, you don't have it make
sense and it lives in a vacuum that
you're not really optimizing your results
and your advertising data. It's important to
heed the metrics of the ad platforms to look
at what they can give you, how many conversions you have, what your return on
your ad spend is. Those are really
important metrics. But when you pull it back
into your organization, you can say why
that's important. Why is return on ad
spend important? Because your company's
objective is profit. Why are cliques important? Well, because your company's
objective is to get more people coming to see
your offer so they can buy. Why is revenue important? Because your company
set some kind of top-line revenue goal
that you want to reach. And you realize that
ad platforms are the only way to
do this at scale. And so that's why
this is so cool. If you want to heed your
company's objectives, if you want to execute
on those things, you need to get tactical. And the way that you
get tactical is by utilizing the strengths of the platforms at your disposal, especially your ad platforms. And so that's why
it's a vital corner, a vital component to the
overall marketing mix, the overall reporting
system we have. Okay, so this wraps up our
section on the four corners, the force strength of your
ultimate reporting system. So join me in our next
video where we talk about the KPIs for your
company's strategy.
7. 7. KPIs from Your Company Strategy: Okay, it's time to talk about KPIs for your e-commerce store. The first KPIs that
I want to talk about come from your
company's strategy. Now as I've explained earlier, your company's strategy is
something that maybe you set up later on after
you've seen some success. But you absolutely need to have some targets
for your business, especially as you mature. And so I'm going to give you some ideas for what
you can measure, what KPIs you can measure for your business key performance
indicators to say, Hey, we're doing this right, things are going well. And as I go through
this section, you're going to find
that KPI's that are coming from one system
are interrelated, are very much related to KPIs
from other systems as well. And so that's really cool and that's really how
this all works together. I also want to start out
this section and I'll probably remind you in
future sections too with a pro tip that is that more KPIs does not usually
mean more success. In fact, fewer KPIs can be a rallying call
for your business, especially if you're
a small business or a growing business, to do fewer things well, and you'll find more
success from that. Even though if you
think more is better, more is usually worse
when it comes to KPIs. So I do not expect
you to use all 25 of these KPIs as your way of
measuring your business. Because frankly, it'll take you a lot of time to pull
them together and not all these things
really will matter for you depending on what phase
of business that you're at. But with that out of
the way, I'm gonna share with you KPIs one through five of our 25 e-commerce KPIs. And these all have to relate with company objectives
that you're gonna set. The first one,
profit per customer. Profit per customer as a KPI
that you said to say, Hey, every time that we
get a customer, we want to have a certain
amount of profit come in. We want to have 50% profit, we want to have 80% profit. We want to have 20%
profit after advertising, it's how much money
you want to make for the customers you bring in the second KPI for your company's strategy
and objectives. It's pretty closely related
to profit per customer, but it's gross margins on sales. Now, gross margins include
taking how much you sold something for
and backing out any advertising costs
you have on it, backing out the cost to
produce the product. And so if it costs you $20 to create a
product or a widget, you can sell it for $99. Your gross margin
is $80 or 300%, which is pretty nice margin
to have on a business. But when you start to get into the point where maybe
you're discounting or you're having a lot of
promotions and that normally $99 or $100 widget you sell goes down to $40 while you're only
making $20 in profit, or a 100% gross
margin on the sales. And so it's not nearly as appealing if you bring
your prices down. And so a lot of companies will say, let's discount, discount, discount in order to get
high top line revenue. Let's go for the millions,
let's go for the moon. But sometimes that
increases your overhead significantly while eliminating
or reducing your profit. And so you want to make
sure that you have a profit goal as well
as a top-line goal. The number three KPI for your e-commerce store is
sales forecasting by month. Now one of the dirty little
secrets of e-commerce is that about 50% or
sometimes more of sales for e-commerce
come in November and December for physical
goods around the holidays. And that's really
hard because you sort of go through a whole year hoping that it's
going to work out. And as long as it does
work out, you're there. But that can be
pretty stressful. Companies over time, they tried to do things
to mitigate and to flatten their revenue
curve as much as they can. They're not gonna
say, I don't want to have my thing be a holiday gift, but they're gonna
focus more on trying to have more
promotions throughout the year or talk to
their customers more so they can flatten
their revenue. It's the reason why
Amazon has Prime day in July because that's usually
their worst sales month. And they introduced
their own promotion in order to flatten revenue. Sales forecasting
by month as a KPI, you can have in
place to say, Hey, here's how much sales we think we're going to
generate this month. And here's how
it's gonna happen, here's how it's gonna go down. Number four, this
one is very much related to your top-line revenue and what products are selling. Inventory projections, projecting the inventory you're
going to need over time. Understanding that maybe 50% of your sales are going to
come during the holidays. Or understanding that
you're gonna have campaigns out there to try to
flatten your revenue curve. So you're going to need
more inventory than normal because you're trying
to do some promotions. Inventory projections
are very much aligned with your
marketing campaigns. If something's successful, are you going to have
enough to fulfill? Or we get the
cutoff the campaign early because you did too well. That's actually
happened to me many times in my e-commerce
experience where we had to cut off campaigns because we didn't have
enough inventory. Inventory projections are
gonna be really important here because if run a campaign you spend money but
you can't fulfill it, you're gonna end
up losing money, a lot of money because
you're still paying. Ad platforms are
still paying out, but you're not
bringing anything in. Then the number five KPI for your e-commerce store is
Profit and Loss analysis. And this is something that
every business over time does, especially medium to
large businesses, but an understanding of whether your business is making
money or not and doing an analysis as to what expenses could be trimmed
or accounted for, as well as what type
of revenue you need to bring in to staff
your business, to staff your organization. So a P and L, or profit
and loss statement, is a very important
KPI to follow. And it's one that mature companies end up
building toward. If you don't do that
right now in your store, one of the signs that
you are maturing is that you now make a
commitment to saying, I'm going to have a P
and L for my business. And as I said earlier, every one of these KPIs is not only interrelated to
your company's strategy, but also will affect the KPIs that you have from the other systems
that are out there. It's a combination of
these items that are gonna give you the perfect reporting system
for your business. And so be on the lookout for our next video where
we're gonna get into the KPIs from your
e-commerce software reports.
8. 8. KPIs from Your Ecommerce Platform: Okay, Let's talk more about KPIs from your e-commerce
software reports. And we have six KPIs
in this section. But before we go any further, I want to continue with my
tip for you and that is it. More KPIs does not necessarily
mean more success. And in fact, you should
limit the number of KPIs you have to the
size of your team. And I think good benchmark
to follow as about one KPI per person responsible for product and marketing
in your business. If you don't have a big team, do not try to implement
all 25 of these. And even if you
have a huge team, Twenty-five of
these will probably be a little bit too
much to follow. Focus on the KPIs that seemed to make the most sense for you. Where your company
is that right now? Kpi number six, overall revenue
for your business by day, week, month or year. Now this is very
easy to pull from your e-commerce platform and from the reports they
have it everywhere. And all you need to do is take a report that would be around revenue and then segmented
by whether you want a day, week, month, quarter, or year. And you can say, How are we doing during that time period? Pretty easy to do, but one that people need to look
at all the time. I look at this weekly
for my e-commerce store, if not more
frequently than that. And then we tie things
out in a month and then you look at the year to
date all the time as well. Those are all coming right
from the e-commerce platform. The number seven KPI,
product revenue. How much money are you making
on a product level basis? Now this will tell
you whether or not products are successful, but it will also
tell you whether or not something is being
marketed properly. And so if a product that you
spent a lot of time with has some ups and downs or it doesn't reach its
revenue potential, you can either say,
let's kill the product, let's not do this anymore
because it's not effective. Or let's do a major
marketing campaign to let people know about it. Because sometimes product
interests has not really a function of whether
the product is good or not, it is marketing. And so you can use
this report to make the determination
for your business. You can also use the
report in number eight, which is your product
category revenue to make similar decisions. Now you might find that
talking about one topic, t-shirts does not as well as
hooded sweatshirts or hats, or shorts or shoes. Like if you're a clothing store, those things are all going to be lumped together in
different ways. And so if you do a
category analysis, you can see what categories
are doing well for you. And that'll help you make
different decisions than you might make from an
individual product. Individual product might be a campaign to promote
that product, category revenue lagging or
category inventory being over inventory or
having too much of it might lead you to a
campaign for a category, which is usually a
more efficient use of ad spend because you give people multiple
options versus saying it has to be for
this one product. And so this is really
cool and you can see how things are correlated. And our first section, we talked about inventory
as a company KPI. Now when you're over inventory, you can run a discount or
a promo in order to get something out the door
in order to get rid of and move some
of that inventory. And when you're
under inventoried, you might do the
analysis there and say, Hey, maybe we need to expand this category because
we keep on selling out. And that's why I love
how this all comes together from different systems. The number nine, KPI,
customer loyalty. Now I've mentioned here
several times that I loved the customer
analytics component, your e-commerce software, I would do analyses of
customers all the time for my e-commerce store
as I was running it for the Fortune 20 company. And what we would do
is we would export the data from customers
and say, Okay, well, which customers have
spent over a $1000, which customers are
spent over $500? Then we would even contact
them and say, Hey, why did buy so much product?
What do you like about us? What are we doing
for you that we can keep on giving to you? What value are we adding? So you talked to
your best customers and you can understand
how they can be more loyal and then how you can
mark it to others using the language of
your best customers to get more revenue coming in. And so customer loyalty is an awesome way of using this
data to understand that. And that can be
there. Becoming from your system that will tell
you your best customers. Or you can do an export, like I've talked about and
do that analysis and get all the contact information and talk to your best customers. Number ten, if you're moving
to a revenue flattening events like trying
to make it so that your revenues consistent
month over month. That'll be number ten,
subscription revenue and analytics around
your subscriptions. So how many people are
becoming members of your site? How many people are on
a continuity program where they're
subscribing and saving. And how is that
affecting and making your business more consistent? Again, Amazon has assigned here, they have subscribe and
save for their products. And that's because they know that maybe you bought
it in the holidays, but I want to sign
you up for doing it during January when
nobody buys anything. I don't know about you,
but I've been buying a lot more health
and fitness products and a lot of times they say, okay, start out with the gates, subscribe and save 15% off. Now the reason why they
do that, the reason why they get that discount, because they want
to lock you in and make it frictionless
for you to have this product over
and over again. Because they know
that repeat customers and loyal customers are
worth a lot of money. Going back to our last KPI. And so you might say, Hey, we want to get a
certain amount of revenue from subscriptions. And we're gonna do analysis
on this in order to figure out how to maximize this
subscription value. And you can do that right from your shopping cart software. Something that I do for
our data-driven insiders program all the time
because we're always looking at ways to continue
to add value and to make our customers excited
for the next thing we do. And it all starts with knowing how long they stay in
the program and doing that level of analysis
and analytics on our subscription and members. Number 11, coupon usage
and average discounts. Of course, promotions are a big thing in the
online business. Almost everything
that I buy online comes with some kind of discount or some kind of promotion. I'll often sign up for an
email list to see if I get a good deal or see
if I get a promotion. And that can help you. If you pull that data down, you can do an analysis
as to whether people are buying at full price or if promotions are absolutely
necessary and how it affects everything
in your business. And so that's why it's
an important KPI to say, should we use coupons,
should we not? And how do we pay
attention to this? Now I will tell you
that at various levels, I use all six of the
KPIs from this section. And that's where a
lot of this comes from experience knowing that these things are
important and there's a level of analysis you
can do for each of them. But being aware of that piece of data and being aware
as to how that affects your business is something
you should be thinking about too as you mature in
your reporting journey. So that's it for six KPIs, only six really,
there could be lots, lots more from your
shopping cart software. Hopefully you enjoyed them and stay tuned for
our next video where we're going to talk about
KPIs from Google Analytics.
9. 9. KPIs from Google Analytics Reports: Kpis from your Google
Analytics reports. Let's get right into
it and talk about what you can learn from Google Analytics because
there's a lot of them. Actually, this is the meat of our presentation of 25 KPIs. A good amount of them
lie within here. But again, my disclaimer and, or pro tip, more KPIs does
not mean more success. So don't take every one
of these things and think that you need to
implement them right away. These all have a time
and place and serve a purpose at various
points in your journey. And so even though
they're listed here doesn't mean that
you need to stress out about having them all more KPIs is not equal better
in most cases. But with that said, I do want to share with you things that I've looked
at over the years in Google Analytics to
make our reports better and to really understand
how to make a store growth. This is KPI number 12. This is the first KPI in this
section, but 12 overall, that is E-commerce conversions
and conversion rate. I will tell you this. You're responsible for sending traffic to an e-commerce store. Conversion rate is
your best friend. If you don't know
your conversion rate, then you shouldn't
be sending traffic because if you
can't measure that, then your traffic is
pretty much useless. And no matter what your rate is, you will find that the quality of traffic and the quality of people you send
to your site will majorly affect your
conversion rate. Well, you can say
what's the average conversion rate for
an e-commerce store, but it's irrelevant
because email does better than blind
paid search ads, brand search terms do better than overall generic
organic search. Influencer marketing
campaigns with a product endorsement are gonna do better than any other type of
marketing out there. Probably because
somebody is saying, Hey, I recommend this product. Affiliate marketing
can do really well. It can do even better
than other ones. And so every single channel may have a different
conversion rate. And so e-commerce conversions
and conversion rate, those are KPIs they can
pay attention to and you can segment on to better
understand your traffic. Number 13 is the $1
million tool which is attribution modeling
for your ad spend in GA. Now the reason why I call it a million-dollar tool, actually, I should probably call
it a $150 thousand tool, is because when Google Analytics first released
attribution modeling, it was only available to their 360 customers
for a 150 K a year. Now It's been around
for many years. And so we're talking a
million plus dollars, you'd have to pay if you
wanted to have this in place. Yet, it's free in GA. So you can get this
in Google Analytics, attribution modeling based on however you want to pay
attention to attribution. And so it's a really
awesome report and tool and it can be a
great KPI for you. So what does this mean? What does attribution
modeling mean? It tells you what traffic source contributed the most to a sale. So it's either first
way they came to you the last way or
somewhere in-between. And you can change
the model to say, I want to give more
credit to the opening, or I want to get more
credits to closing, or I want to spread
credit evenly. And so that happens with
attribution modeling. Really cool tool number
14, path to purchase. What were the steps
that somebody took in order to make
a purchase from you? What pages would they
go to on your site? Was there any friction along the way when people didn't
buy, where else did they go? They can learn that
within your GPA. You can also do number is 1516171819 as well within GA. You can report
on traffic sources. You can see what traffic
sources are doing the best. That can be number 16, paid ads can be number 17,
your e-mail marketing. Number 18, organic
search, and number 19, even social influence campaigns, Campaigns around
word of mouth or trying to get somebody to
recommend your product. Those are all things
you can measure the results and effectiveness
of those within GA. There's number 20, which is Google Analytics for
which is the future of GA and the latest and
most recommended version of GA from Google
themselves. And that's it. And our next video, we
are going to wrap up the KPIs list with
numbers 21 through 25 by talking about KPIs for advertising
platform reports.
10. 10. KPIs from Your Advertising Platform: Okay, This is the final
section of our KPIs, and this is the KPIs from
advertising platform Reports is where we're going to
get from number 21 to 25 of our KPIs. But remember, final disclaimer
on this and that is it. More KPIs does not
mean more success. Don't look at this and say you need to implement every
one of these things. I just want to point in the direction of
things you can look at for your e-commerce
store to make sure you are addressing the needs of your store at
the time you're at right now. You may use all 25
of these over time. Some of them might
be important right away and not as important later, but make sure you pay attention
to them and then say, Okay, do I have an
opinion on this? And might this be
helpful in getting me unstuck what I'm looking
at facing in my store. The KPIs to pull
from ad platforms. Number one, conversions.
Conversions is important. You see it show up twice, it shows up once in our e-commerce section
from our Google Analytics. But then you want to pay
attention to conversions from your ad platform because
it can mean many things. It can mean sales, it can mean any leads you get. It can mean impressions. You got to make sure
that you hone in conversions to be the
KPI you're looking for. Because oftentimes these ad
platforms are misleading, saying you have tons
of conversions, but then you look in
your bank account or your shopping cart software
and you ain't got nothing. The reason why is because conversions means
one thing to them. It means that they
drove an action. Doesn't mean the
same thing to you. Where you're looking
for cold hard cash when you're looking for your
bottom line, number 21, conversions is important
to pay attention to ad platforms and
then cross-reference that with Google Analytics
number Twenty-two, revenue. How much money is
your business making? Pretty good one, right?
Pretty important one to pay attention to. Now, the revenue
that you report on, the revenue and
your bank account, the revenue from your shopping
cart software is most important because that's
what actually was captured. But you want to compare that to your ad platforms So they can give you a pretty
good idea as to how much money you're
making from ads and how they can attribute that to
the advertising platform. And when they do that,
that comes to number 23, which is rho as
return on ad spend. They are tracking the return
on ad spend you have. So if you spend $10
on Facebook ads, for example, and you
drive $50 of revenue. They're going to tell you
that your ROAS is 400%. Now they don't back
out your margins. The company objectives that
we talked about earlier, they don't backup
that they don't pay attention to that at all. They only care about how
much you spent on ads, how much you made in
revenue, top-line revenue. And so they don't backup
any of your expenses. They don't care if
you're paying an agency. They don't care what
coupons were used. They just want to tell
you the amount of money generated from the
money you paid them. And trust me, when I say
this can be very misleading. Iran and e-commerce store, whereas making a 10 thousand
per cent return on ad spend. And yet I lost money. And that's because
everything else was a mess in that business. So I quickly got out of there, but I learned that lesson
once and for all and not as trusting the
advertising platform to show you how much money you're making and how
much profit you're making is not really
the name of the game. It's just going to tell
you what the return on your actual spend is
not your overall ROI. So be careful when
paying attention to these metrics and take
them with a grain of salt, but always pay attention
to them, okay, KPI number 24 is
your bid strategy. Now bid strategies are
something that are built-in natively to the Google ads and
the Facebook ads platform. And they help you say,
What are you bidding for? Now these are auction
based systems, so you have to compete against other advertisers to show up. It's going to the highest bidder to show up on these
ad platforms, you have to put your money
where your mouth is, and you need to win the
auction or show up in the oxygen in order
to be on the page. And so when you have
a bid strategy, you're saying, what is my
strategy for that oxygen? Do I wanna be the
first-person every time? Do I want to save as
much money as I can by not paying too much in
showing up lower on the page, but I want to show up only
at certain times a day. Those bids strategies that
you implement even influenced the overall return
on your advertising and so dislike ROAS shows
you the hard number. Bid strategy might be
a KPI for you to say, what are we actually doing here? What does a strategy
we'd have with advertising and how do we
want to approach this? And then there's number 25,
and that is impression share. The impression share shows how often you're showing up
in searches on Google, how often you're showing up in potential advertising
on Facebook. And it lets, you know, are you capturing a 100% of the possibility or a
much smaller percentage of the overall population. Metrics like impression share, help you understand, is there a bigger market
you can go after? Are you tapping into the
entire market you have? Or is there room for gains, room for improvement
in the future? And that's why I love
to pay attention to this as well as a KPI. Now, obviously the
ad platform KPIs, maybe ones that you
end up sending to your advertising agency or
you have them provide you. But these are ones
that you might want to pay attention to because they impact your strategy
and your results. And they impact the strategy overall for the company as well. Okay, so that's it for our KPIs. I just went through
all 25 with you. And it leads us to
our next section. We're going to talk about how to take all this information, put it together, and build
the perfect reporting system. And I'm going to start
with strategic insights. So that's going to
convert our next video, and I can't wait to reveal
it to you in just a moment.
11. 11. Putting It All Together: Okay, so now that we know
are 25 e-commerce KPIs, let's put it all
together and develop the perfect e-commerce
reporting systems. The perfect
e-commerce system has four components like
we've been talking about, but it's not the same for components that I've
been mentioning here, not the four platforms. That's what those
four platforms can do when you intersect
them together. It all comes down to saying, how do we match our strategy? How do we make a better plan? What tactics should
we implement and how do we perform better
to get better results? And so the platforms we talked about along with their purpose, which we're gonna talk
about in this video, combines to make the perfect
e-commerce reporting system. The perfect e-commerce
reporting system draws from several sources of truth to aid you in
making better decisions. And these decisions
help you out, like I said in four
different ways. Let's talk about number one, which is strategic insights. Now there's no better
tool to inform your strategy then your
company's objectives, as well as the results you're getting from your
e-commerce platform. When you combine your
company's strategy and your e-commerce
platform together, what you end up
seeing is insights as to how should
we go to market. Remember I said you really can't plan your company's performance. You can't plan a company
without any sales data, without any product market fit. So you need to start
selling products. But then as soon as you
start selling products, you should be informing
your strategy. So you can do this
over and over again. And so these two things
are interconnected, almost inseparable
for a business. And as you noticed here, we're not really talking yet about advertising or analytics. We're not talking
about tactics at all because this is
purely strategic. Strategies come from your e-commerce platform
or your performance, your past, if you will, as well as where your company wants to go into the future. The next part of the system
is tactical insights. Because when you notice
that your strategy is off, the first place you
want to go is to the tactics you need supporting data to make improvements
to your strategy. And this is where
Google Analytics and you're advertising platforms
really come to shine. Because the more
granular data you have, the more tactical you can
be with your precision. If you're struggling
or if ends aren't meeting for your
e-commerce business. The first place to look
as tactics to say, how do we drum up
some more interests? How do we drum up
some more results? And these tactics
can be anything from conversion rate optimization to optimize in your ad spend with
what ad platforms around. There's all kinds
of little gains. You can make 10, 20% here there. That'll make your site
perform way better. And you could ever imagine, but you need to get into the trenches and then
get into the tactics. If your strategy is off, anybody can set a strategy. Anybody can say x's and o's. I want these numbers to match. I wanted to get this result, but it's the tactics that
make that result possible. You need that in order to go out there and
grow even further. And that's why we have
that second half of the continuum between
strategy and tactics. And it's funny because I
intuitively knew this, but I didn't really
have a way to phrase it up until I created
this matrix for you. But I remember it many times
during my eight years, running all the reporting and advertising for an
e-commerce store, a growing multi-million
dollar e-commerce store. My clients would
always say to me, But is that a strategy? What I would tell them a tactic for how we're going
to improve things. I didn't have the confidence or a way of telling them back then that the strategy
is the tactics. The tactics are going to help us execute on that strategy. It's important. Now they just wanted the high-level details
because there are a lot of MBAs and a
lot of executives. But frankly, if I didn't go into the trenches
and know that data, we wouldn't have grown at all. And that has a secret
to e-commerce. You grow from
tactical precision. You need that granular data
in place to grow in that way. The next component is
planning insights. When something works
for your business, a natural reaction is to say, That's great, How
do we get more? And while I told you
the answer lies in the data and allies
within Google Analytics, you also want to plan Google Analytics data
that granular data, along with your
company's objectives until let me give you an example
of why that's important. When we talked about company
objectives and KPIs, a lot of the KPIs were
around things like revenue, profit, making sure
that you're going Well, inventory projections and so on. Well, if you want
to plan for having more inventory to your business, your e-commerce software
is one way to do that, but even better
way is to see how campaigns are performing
everywhere you're going and you get that
from Google Analytics. Google Analytics is gonna
give you the tactical data that you can use to
plan better the future. And so the best planning system is taking your
company's objectives and matching them up real-time with what's
happening in Google Analytics. And that tells you
what you need to do and how you can forecast and deal with your
inevitable success once you get these two
things working together. The fourth component, the final one is
performance insights. And this is where your
business is held accountable. And it starts and ends with
the outcomes that you drive. It all comes down to
products and sales ads, products, sales marketing. And obviously at this point, product and sales that comes
from your ad platforms as well as your
e-commerce platforms to inform your
performance goals. You can't have one
without the other. And so if you are curious
about how do you get more? If you want to make sure
that you are getting the best results that you have, and you want to make
sure that your company is performing well. You plan in one way with your GA data in your
company objectives, but then the performance
all comes down to holding your ad
platforms accountable, holding your
products accountable and making sure
there's a synergy there that if you say I want
to sell more of this thing, you need to make sure
you have an inventory. If you need to
make sure you have the right marketing campaign, you need to make sure that
you are putting it all in a line to increase
product sales. The product has to be good too. And so when it comes to
planning for future success, there's no better place to look than inside your
e-commerce software and at holding your
traffic sources or your advertising
platforms accountable. So that's the four components of the perfect reporting
system, free commerce. We're almost near the
end of this course. We're going to start
wrapping things up in our next video where
I talked about how easy or hard it is to implement
these reporting features. And I'm gonna tell you
where you can get started if you want to implement
something right away.
12. 12. Where Do We Go From Here?: Okay, So at this point
I have given you the components you need for the perfect e-commerce
reporting system. I've given you 25 KPIs
that you've can follow. I've given you a strengths of every single reporting
system that's out there. And I've tied it all
together as to why I built this over eight years, working as the proprietor of an e-commerce
store for a very, very large internationally
known brand, helping them grow by millions of dollars
by implementing this. And there was really a
lot of fun along the way. And I've had a pleasure to showing you exactly
how this all came together and how I look at the world of
e-commerce and how I realize that it's not just
one thing that's perfect. There's not just one
place you can look. One source of truth. You really need to be
resourceful and a pull data from several different
places if you want to make progress and if you want to have
a complete picture, because it's one thing
to be strategic, but without the tactics, you won't be able to execute. And it's one thing to
have a great plan, but if you can't perform, then the plan is not very good. Either. Write, these things
all come together and they all have strengths and weaknesses and they
make you more complete. So there's four corners,
four components, 25 KPIs, a lot of cool things that I've shared with you
throughout this course. I'm going to wrap up this video by sharing with you
how easy it is. Master each component of this ultimate perfect
e-commerce reporting system. I'm gonna start
with the easiest, the easiest place to find data. The easiest and most
intuitive way is to just look at the reports in
your e-commerce platform. Once you start selling, once you start having customers, they're gonna give
you insights as to who bought, how
much they bought, what products they bought, when they bought, how
frequently they buy, how much revenue you made, how much revenue
you made by day, month, week and year. They're gonna give
you all that stuff. And it's just there
right out of the box. And frankly, it really
doesn't matter if you're using one
platform or the other. They all have very
similar features. And I sort of look at them in the same light because they're helping us
with those things. They are telling us what the relationship
between products, customers and revenue overall. We can use it for planning. They can tell us all
kinds of cool stuff, but it really is
limited and that's why these other tools exist and
so it can get you so far. But then if you want
to grow your business, if you want to perform, then you need to get
into the tactics. And the next one is
a tactical platform, and that is the next
easiest thing to do is to implement your
ad platform reporting. Now I call this easy
because usually ad platforms are
based on pixels. You install a pixel
on every page of your site to track visitors and what's
happening on your site. Then you install
either the same pixel or you configure it whenever you sell something to let
them know that you sold something and set up your
conversions in their platform. And they give you all
kinds of cool reports like row as you can see, stuff like impression share. You can see things like
your bid strategies and affect all of those
ad platforms. And so the reason
why it's easiest, because you set it up one time. Usually it's already built into the shopping cart you have in place and it starts to work. So you might not even need to be an expert on the Facebook pixel. You can just use the Shopify integration and suddenly you have it in place. So the barrier is
pretty low with ad platforms and so it's pretty easy to get
insights for them. And that's why a lot of
people turn to advertising as their first way of bringing in customers for their business. Because they know
that they can set it, turn it on and get the results
and sometimes forget it, or at least get some initial data
and starting to find that product market fit. Especially with algorithms
like Facebook's that will find you look-alike people of your best customers
and have them come in. A little bit of success. Plus advertising can
help you amplify things five to ten
x pretty easily. And that's why I consider
it to be easier to use, not a lot of technical
implementation. Okay, the next one, it's hard. That is Google Analytics
e-commerce reporting. Now it's easier if
you use a plug-in again for a Shopify or for
whatever store you have, it gets easier in that case, but it's still not the
easiest thing to do to implement Google Analytics,
e-commerce reporting. And not only that, but you have to make
sure you get it right. A lot of times you
have to work with a consultant and it takes
a good amount of effort. And there's a lot of steps
that are what I consider to be mystifying for people who
are trying to set this up. Now the good news is that, as you probably know,
but maybe you don't. My career is as a Google
Analytics Consultant. And so I've helped people set up their e-commerce stores
to track this properly. And not only just to set it up, but to get insights
from the reports. A big part of my system that I developed over those eight
years and working with the major company was to pull Google Analytics in it
as a source of truth, to inform our tactics, and to help us perform better and to plan
better as a result. And so even though I consider Google Analytics
hard, and frankly, I've worked with a lot of
companies and I've implemented their analytics and it's usually a 10 thousand plus
dollar projects. So yeah, it's hard if you're
paying somebody like me $10 thousand to fix it, that
means that it was hard. But the reality
is that it is not nearly as hard if you have a proper guide or
proper training. And the final thing
that's very hard and this is because you
need to get consensus. He needed to get an understanding
amongst your company is setting KPIs
for your company. This is the one that seems like it'd be the easiest because all you're doing is just putting numbers
into a spreadsheet. But the discussion
that it triggers and thinking about it
for your company and what's important to you thinking about stuff
that you didn't have to think about before,
like profit margins, the mature pieces of growing a business that is
hard because it's, there's no perfect way and
it's so open-ended that you might be overwhelmed by thinking about all the
different possibilities, but you shouldn't be overwhelmed because
I've already given you several KPIs you can use and the strengths of
doing it yourself. And hopefully this training
helped you get there. And this is just one of
those things where I will at some point in the
future, I'm pretty sure of it. Be doing a training
just about setting KPIs for your
e-commerce business. And so make sure that
you pay attention to this space and you can see when that's released just in
closing for this course, hopefully you enjoyed it. I gave you a lot of ideas. A lot of ideas that you can use. Some of them you can
implement right away. Others are going to require work as well as additional
training overall, hopefully you've found my way of teaching you to
be interesting, compelling, and
worth learning from. And if you want to
learn about any of these topics that
I cover in depth, I encourage you to
check out what we have on this platform as well. You can click around and
some of these other videos. So there's other things
that I've taught and see my entire catalog because
I want to make sure that you have the confidence that
you need in order to be a more effective
e-commerce store owner or analyst or consultant. Anybody who's working
in this space. And trust me, it took me a while to develop my own system, but once I got it in place, we became much more
effective when we grew like crazy and I want to
help you get there as well. Hopefully it leads you on the right track for
what you can do for your business and how you
can grow and how you can look at the world from
the mind of an analyst. Somebody who cares
about these things, somebody who looks at
data all the time.