Web analytics gives data and data make decisions. With the growing importance of social media signals in determining consumer buying behavior models, business owners in the ecommerce space have truly realized the need for social media analytics.
Just think of small or medium scale online store owners. Their resources are limited. Time and burn rate being always critical for them, they can't afford to take any risk in their investment strategies. Without knowing what marketing channels work profitable for them and how, they might go haywire.
Social media channels being major suppliers of early adopters, influencers, and buyers, it is essential that store owners closely monitor their presence to derive statistical insights for decision-making. They need to know -
- What are the best social media practices for an online store?
- Which social media has a profound impact on sales activities?
- How to convert followers and likes into repeat visits and sales?
- How to use social media to boost cross-selling of ecommerce products?
- Which channel is no longer profitable and what makes up the 80/20 business rule?
- What are the social media signals that drive product pricing or strategic decisions?
- How can social media improve customer service of an online store?
- How to nurture existing customers and drive new leads using social media popularity?
- What are the best and upcoming customer engagement models?
- How to outrank competitors in brand building activities in social media?
Given the fact that only tools can satisfy all the above requirements and beyond, at a lower cost, a lot of companies have been constantly developing social media analytics tools for online merchants. There are good demands of social networks modules as they make social networking and review an easy process for business owners.For example, PrestaShop offers hundreds of modules that are compatible with Facebook, Twitter, Live, Amazon, Digg, LinkedIn and more. There are similar other vendors who are also doing pretty well in the same domain.
Following are some of the leading analytical tools that maximize the values of your social media efforts.
Google Analytics (GA) is the most comprehensive web analytics tool for ecommerce site owners. It's intuitive, easy-to-use and dynamic reporting capability can send all your social media driven sales data to your GA account. All that you need to do is to set up ecommerce tracking in your GA admin and then make some changes to your code with the help of programmer or webmaster. Once the tracking feature is enabled, click through to Acquisition>> Social to view the performance of each major social media channel. You can further drill-down to each of the channels for detailed analysis. You may also add Goals to GA tracking and monitor the direct impact of social media on the conversion goals and paths.
Social Mention is a real-time social media search and analysis tool that helps understanding the social media performance of a brand. It allows you to analyze crucial social media meta data such as Strength, Sentiment, Passion, Reach, Top keywords, Top hashtags, sources and then download them in CSV format. The reports are just a few clicks away.
Sprout Social's analytics dashboard is specifically designed to monitor real-time social media activities.Whether it is an analysis of demography, daily engagement, followers count or other statistics such as unique visits and page impressions, ecommerce site owners can access to various intelligent reports such as Group Report, Engagement Report, Team Report, Facebook Report, Trends Report and more.
"Social Media Analytics Designed for Serious Marketers" - the definition itself is self-explanatory. The tool has been designed specifically to cater to the world's biggest brands, so they may not be within the budget of smaller merchants. However, a number of helpful free reports from them for Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest can keep you busy understanding your owned, earned and paid social media better.
SumAll Insights is a robust tool that provides unlimited tracking of every important metric whether you use social media, ecommerce or other web services. It not only provides you with social media guidelines and insights, but also takes a closer look at post timing, hashtags,post length, keywords and insights-full data related to your social media performance. Since the platform is sophisticated and full of diversity, online merchants need training assistance and support materials to learn the tool usage.
SumAll not only provides data from major social networks, but also integrates popular shopping carts such as Shopify, eBay, Amazon, Bigcommerce and payment gateways like PayPal, Authorize.net, Etsy, Stripe and more.
Social Report lets you go beyond social analytics. It helps you evaluate the influence of social media on your ecommerce site reviews and online business. The powerful social media dashboard and its multiple feature scan further strengthen your social strategy. You can generate fully-featured, presentable, and detailed reports with who, what, when and how of a social media signal using configurable dashboards. Social Report supports a multitude of channels and gets you important social media metrics from Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter as well as popular social sharing sites like Reddit, Slideshare, Xing, Vimeo, and YouTube.
It is a tool from Compete.com that deals with the conversion process of your site and identifies the area of concerns (bounce rate, store locator rate) in your sales funnel. It also gives you a comparison of your competitor's conversion metrics and helps you improve shopper engagement to a great extent. Online Conversion Insights lets you understand what competitor sites your customers deal with, what their experiences are and how your competitors manage shopping behavior to win new deals. You may even benchmark the conversion rate and measure overall performance month on month.
Quintly is a social media benchmarking tool that helps you evaluate social media performance by comparing it with competitors and best-practice examples. The greatest advantage of using this tool is that you can combine the data of Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram in one platform and visualize social marketing success and failure in a better way.
If you need business intelligence help from your favorite blog, social media networks, video sites, forums and other microblogging platforms, Sysomos is one tool that works great. With Sysomos you can monitor social campaigns, optimize social media efforts, identify opportunities and build influencers in real-time.
The above social media analytics tools are only a few among many. You may also give a try to Followerwonk, Buffer, Cyfe, Keyhole, Addictomatic, Klou - some of the free analytics tools to gain valuable insights.
Over to you
So, what social media analytics tools have you used so far for your ecommerce store? What makes you confident in using such tools? I'd like to hear how you rate these tools in terms of usability, data representation and quality of information. You may also share what in these tools do not work for you. Let's make it a progressive exercise and we all will benefit.