Analyse Ecommerce reporting to improve your sales

Ecommerce Overview

The Ecommerce Overview section is the best place to get a high-level view of your online store’s general performance. At a glance, you can see how many sales you’re making, how much revenue they are generating, and your website’s conversion rate.

Tracking trends with row evolution chart

If you want to see how your sales have been trending over time, then you can review the evolution graph shown at the top of the Ecommerce Overview page.

You can customise which data points are plotted on this graph by clicking on the grey metrics picker icon at the top left. This brings up a list of metrics which you can click to enable. Currently enabled metrics will be shown with a green tick beside them.

These are the metrics available by default:

• Ecommerce Orders
• Conversion Rate
• Total Revenue
• Purchased Products
• Average Order Value

While looking at the relevant data in this view, you can hover over any of the data points to display the specific numbers for that period, as shown below.

If you’d like to change the period each data point represents, move your mouse into the graph area and then click on the green calendar icon that appears at the bottom left half of the card. Your selection here will update the chart to display data increments by the: Day, Week, Month or Year.

Within the same green icon menu (shown above) you will also see a few other icons:

• Export Icon – This allows you to export the raw data to work with other tools.
• Image Icon – This generates an image of the chart so you can use it in external reports.
• Annotation Icon – This lets you review or add relevant annotations.

Ecommerce Annotations

If you have been using the annotations feature, you will notice annotation icons along the bottom of the evolution graph. You can either hover your mouse over these icons or click on them to reveal notes within your selected reporting period.

This feature can be useful for keeping track of things, like when you launch new products, or make changes to the design of your ecommerce pages. Your notes here will often provide helpful context for sudden changes within your trends.

Ecommerce health check with sparkline summaries

The sparkline summary card just below the row evolution section provides a high-level overview of your Ecommerce statistics. The data shown in these charts and text summaries represent the date range you’ve selected via the Date Picker at the top of the page.

The following statistics are displayed within the sparkline summary card:

• Ecommerce Orders
• Total Revenue
• Average Order Value
• Ecommerce Orders conversion rate
• Purchased Products
• Visits with Abandoned Cart
• Revenue left in cart
• Visits with Abandoned Cart

If you would like a closer look at any of these statistics over time, you can click on the summary to update the full-sized evolution graph above this section with the relevant data.

Understanding the Abandoned Cart Analytics

Cart abandonment happens when somebody adds a product to their shopping cart but for one reason or another, doesn’t make a purchase. Often the total value of products abandoned in online shopping carts, accounts for a large amount of lost potential revenue. Without analytics, you might never realise this was happening. Matomo can not only track how many people abandon their carts, but also the potential revenue that was lost in their carts. If you discover that you have a problem with lots of people abandoning carts you can use Matomo to dig into what might be happening.

People may partially complete your checkout for many reasons. One common reason is unclear shipping details, i.e. where visitors only discover how much it will cost to get the product delivered after being forced through the checkout process. Knowing this, you might consider how you can expose this information earlier in the checkout flow. Sometimes people are simply checking your prices against competitors and plan to come back later. Or perhaps you force people to sign up to an account early in your checkout flow, which is putting them off? The first step is knowing you have a problem in this area.

Conversions Overview

The Conversions Overview card shows a simple text summary of the transaction values associated with your website orders. These statistics are displayed in the default currency you’ve configured for your website. Text summaries are provided of:

• Total Revenue – Total value of sales after discounting, including tax & shipping.
• Sub-totals – Total value of all sales, excluding shipping and tax.
• Tax – The total amount of tax charged on all sales.
• Shipping – The total charged for shipping on all sales.
• Discounts – The total value of discounts applied to all sales.

All of these values are based on the Segment and Date Range selected at the top of the page. Below the data, there is a link to Show Visit Log segmented by this Goal. Clicking this link loads a popup containing full details for all of the visits that are contributing to these totals. The linked summary should offer the same detail as in the full Ecommerce Log, unless you have any filters enabled.

Ecommerce Log

If you’re just getting started with Ecommerce analytics and you haven’t made many sales yet, the Ecommerce log can be very helpful. It provides granular session-level data so you can look at the full session for each user that either made a purchase or abandoned their cart. This can help you identify which pages of interest users visited, or if they appear to have fallen out of your sales funnel at a particular stage. It can also be helpful when testing new flows to ensure sessions are acting as you expected in real-time.

Products

The Products view is useful for high-level statistics on product sales. It can help you identify over-performing and under-performing products. You can review sales and conversion rates in a table by either: Name, SKU, or Category, to reveal trends and opportunities. All of the reports in this section can report on the following metrics:

• Product Revenue
• Quantity Sold
• Unique Purchases
• Average Price
• Average Quantity
• Conversion Rate

When hovering over a row in the table, you will see that a small line chart icon appears. You can click on this to review an evolution graph for the highlighted row. You’ll also notice a percentage in light grey which shows the proportion of total sales this row represents.

Product Name and Product SKU Reports

As both of these reports are broken down on a per-product basis, they can help you understand which products your visitors are most interested in, and the impact they have on your business. It can also help you ensure you are driving traffic to the products which are most likely to convert.

You may want to report by SKU (Stock-Keeping Unit) specifically if you sell a product in multiple sizes or quantities, that each share the same name, but have unique SKU numbers. This can allow you to differentiate between the variations of the product sold. Another example might be a site where you sell varying lengths of membership access – with each having the same product name, but holding unique SKUs. Another common reason to use SKU numbers is if the name of a product you sell changes, but the product is the same.

Product Category Report

The Product Category contains the same columns as the name and SKU report described above, but the metrics can be useful in a couple of different ways. Most commonly, it can be useful when your site sells different types of products. You may notice your sales pages convert well for low-cost consumer goods, but your high-end electronics don’t. This could lead you to run some experiments on how you present and sell products in your electronics category.

If you are not running a traditional ecommerce store, you can also get creative with how you configure categories on your ecommerce platform. With the right ecommerce setup, you can set your categories to represent the different audiences your products appeal to. In this case, the category report will help you to understand how well you are reaching and converting your various audiences.

Reviewing Abandoned Carts by Product or Category

By default, all of the above reports are based on sales. However, it is also possible to analyse abandoned cart reports within this section too. To switch between modes, move your mouse over the table area and then click the green cart icon that appears towards the bottom left. This will reveal the option to switch between Ecommerce Orders or Abandoned Carts .

Sales

The next collection of reports relates to orders rather than the individual products within them. These sales reports can help you understand the conditions that lead to sales on your website. This covers things like: how purchasers discover your site, where the users come from, and how long it takes them to convert. Each report below will have the following columns: Visits, Ecommerce Orders, Total Revenue, Ecommerce order, conversion rate, Average Order Value, Purchased Products and Revenue per Visit.

Sales by Referrers

You might be surprised to discover that some traffic sources, deliver a lot of visitors, and even generate lots of engagement on your site, but they simply don’t convert into sales. For an ecommerce store, sales are your most important metric so it will pay to focus your marketing energy on the traffic sources that are leading to sales.

Channel Type Report

The channel report is useful for analysing how your revenue is growing. The amounts are broken down by type of traffic source, e.g. search or website referrals. As an example, imagine you are launching a new software product. To get some initial traction, you start promoting your product through referral websites that list new products. Your initial reports will show strong growth in traffic from websites and campaigns. But over time, as your site becomes more established, you would hopefully notice a shift towards more traffic and sales from search engines.

Search Engines Report

This report tracks not only which search engines are bringing you traffic, but also which ones are sending traffic that converts. Often people focus on the most popular search engines. However, if you notice a significant amount of traffic from specific search engines is resulting in lots of sales, it may be that they are delivering a different type of user.

Strong sales on an alternative search engine could suggest it is worth exploring what advertising options they have to see if they can provide similarly outsized results. Or it could be that certain search engines present your site differently in their search results pages. If so, is there something you could learn from this and make use of for other elements of your online marketing?

Keywords Report

Within the Keywords report, you can see some of the specific search terms people use in Search Engines, such as Google, to find your website before making a purchase. While this report can’t identify every keyword used to reach your site for privacy reasons, it can help you to discover keywords that you might not have considered otherwise. If you are running paid search campaigns, you will likely want to set up campaigns targeting keywords that are showing sales here.

Websites Report

If you feature your website on third party websites, this report can help you to identify which of these sites bring in sales. In the case where you are actively paying to feature on those third party sites, this report can also help you to quantify your return on investment.

Alternatively, you may see that some websites are bringing in lots of sales with little or no input. In this case, it may be worth exploring whether there are opportunities to strengthen your relationship with these sites.

Campaigns (Enabled via Matomo Campaigns Extension)

If you are using the cloud version of Matomo, or if you have the Marketing Campaigns plugin, you can also review sales by Campaign; Name, Keyword, Source, Medium and Content. These dimensions are useful if you advertise through other channels such as email newsletters, paid ads, affiliates, etc. Learn more about Tracking Campaigns.

Sales Engagement

This section is useful for tracking the effectiveness of your site.

Visits to Conversion Report

This report shows how many visits it takes for your users to make an Ecommerce conversion on your site. One example of how to use the data in the Visits to Conversion report is, to build a case for regular email marketing and social media posts to regularly bring people back to your website.

Days to conversion Report

This report shows how many days it takes for your users to make a conversion after first visiting your site. You might notice in the Days to Conversion report that, for example, people tend to purchase seven days after they first visit your website. This fact could suggest you would benefit from sending an email campaign seven days after people first visit your site.

Or you might see that people typically convert a month after visiting your site. This would suggest a need to develop a robust nurturing campaign to keep potential customers engaged with your brand over an extended period. Not all products will be sold on the first visit!

Sales by User location

The next section provides data based on how your website is accessed.

Country, Continent and Region Reports

These show where a user accessed your website from. A couple of examples of how you might use this type of data are:

• If you have physical stores for your business, you might notice local visitors are more or less likely to purchase from your online store.
• If there is significant interest from a particular part of the world, you might consider opening a new location or creating marketing campaigns more targeted to people in this area.

Devices: Type, Model & Brand Reports

While this may not be a primary metric for many sites, analysing sales by device might be an obvious choice for a software company. For example, if you sell an app that can only be used on iPhone or Android devices, then you will want to make sure you are reaching people on those platforms.

However, there can be other reasons to investigate the devices people use to browse your site. For example, if you notice you get equal levels of traffic from Chrome and Safari browsers, but only one browser leads to sales. In that case, it might indicate a website compatibility error. You could follow up by running tests of your website in both browsers and discover that critical elements of your website display very differently, or even break in one of the browsers.

Sales by User attribute

Visits per server time

The Visits by server time report can help you identify user trends for marketing but also potential server related issues. For example, your website could run a backup schedule at 12 pm every day. This report could help you to notice a drop in sales at the same time every day. However, upon further investigation, you might realise this backup process is actually slowing down your site, which is the real reason for a drop in your conversion rates.

Custom Dimension Reports

This section will also contain a report for any Custom Dimensions that you have created. Reporting on your sales broken down by your custom dimensions is very powerful when you have configured relevant dimensions for your audience. Some example dimensions could be User Type (Admin, Author, Guest, etc) or login status for example. In the first case, you probably wouldn’t expect Admins to make a purchase so you can exclude them from consideration. And for the login status you could explore the relation between creating an account on your site and converting to a sale.

Extending Ecommerce Reporting with Multi Channel Attribution (Optional)

Multi Channel Attribution is a premium feature, which is included in Matomo Cloud by default, and can be purchased separately if you use the On-Premises or WordPress versions of Matomo.

Often people visit your site more than once before they make a purchase. Multi Channel Conversion Attribution adds a reporting view that tracks the multiple different sources that have contributed to a sale, not just the most recent source.

To provide an example, someone may have discovered you from search earlier in the year, then followed you on social media, and then bought a product after clicking over from your fan page. By default, Social Networks would get the credit, however, in a multi-attribution world that credit can be shared between the lead sources.

You can review your sales reports with multiple different attribution models:

• Last Interaction – This is the most commonly used attribution model on the web. It simply tracks how people reached you in the session where they made a purchase.
• Last Non-direct – This is based on the same model above, but as a direct visit is often from a bookmark or non-advertising related source, it might be more useful to review the last meaningful source that you can use for optimising your future marketing.
• First Interaction – This allows you to see how somebody first found your website, even if they subsequently made several visits to your site from different traffic sources.
• Linear – In this model, the credit for a sale is split evenly between all interactions no matter at what stage of the conversion process they occurred.
• Position Based – This allows you to allocate most of the credit (40% each) to both the first and last interaction as these are often the most important and then split the remaining 20% across all channels that assisted with the sale in between.
• Time Decay – The final attribution model is based on how long an interaction occurred before a sale. It still assumes that the last interaction is the most relevant for pushing a visitor into a sale, however, it also allocates a decreasing amount of credit to the traffic source of each preceding visit to the website.

Exploring your ecommerce reports with alternative attribution models can provide you with a more nuanced view of your various traffic sources. For example, a specific search ad campaign might always bring in strong sales. However, more in-depth analysis reveals it is simply recapturing people who initially discovered you through an organic search.

Multi-channel attribution can help you discover the real value of each site and how they are performing within your sales cycle. You can also use this knowledge to seek opportunities for improving the performance of specific channels at different stages of your sales funnel.