How to Develop The Best Ecommerce Reporting System For Your Business | Jeff Sauer | Skillshare
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How to Develop The Best Ecommerce Reporting System For Your Business

teacher avatar Jeff Sauer, Google Analytics Strategist

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      1. Intro

      5:14

    • 2.

      2. Components of a Perfect Ecommerce System

      9:55

    • 3.

      3. Strengths of Your Company's Strategy for Ecommerce Reporting

      4:21

    • 4.

      4. Strengths of Ecommerce Software Reports

      4:35

    • 5.

      5. Strengths of Google Analytics Reports

      4:28

    • 6.

      6. Strengths of Advertising Platform Reports

      4:09

    • 7.

      7. KPIs from Your Company Strategy

      6:10

    • 8.

      8. KPIs from Your Ecommerce Platform

      6:50

    • 9.

      9. KPIs from Google Analytics Reports

      4:13

    • 10.

      10. KPIs from Your Advertising Platform

      5:30

    • 11.

      11. Putting It All Together

      6:28

    • 12.

      12. Where Do We Go From Here?

      7:22

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About This Class

What is the best reporting system for Ecommerce stores?

While there are thousands of platforms, vendors, and data points you can choose from to track ecommerce performance, no one software has everything you need in one place.

But at the end of this workshop, you will be able to clearly define the reports that are best for you, so you can focus on what you do best: growing the business to new levels of performance! 

Not only that, but when you fill out this guide, you’ll have a list of the best Ecommerce KPIs you can use for your store, and where to find the data you need. 

Meet Your Teacher

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Jeff Sauer

Google Analytics Strategist

Teacher

I am the founder of Jeffalytics, where I talk about analytics, PPC and entrepreneurship. As a digital nomad, I live in hotels and AirBnBs around the world. You can learn more from me at Analytics Course, PPC Course, and Agency Course.

Teaching is my passion, and I hope you enjoy my Skillshare course!

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Level: Beginner

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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.