Wix eCommerce | How to Use Wix Analytics Tools to Optimize Your Sales

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Hi there, everybody. Welcome to our WIX E Commerce workshop. This week we're going to be talking about how to use WIX analytics tools to optimize your sales. So my name's Liat. I'll be your host today. I lead e commerce marketing at wix. And joining me, we have Doreen. Doreen, would you like to introduce yourself?

Yes. So, hi everyone. So, I'm Doreen. I've been at WIX for more than seven years now, and I been mostly a data analyst on various teams. This January, as we plan to launch the new analytics for our users, I jumped on the opportunity to not only help WIX to get the best insights from the data, but also to our users, and became a product manager in WIX Analytics.

Wow, that's really awesome. So I'm excited to say that today we have both an analyst and a product manager talking to us about analytics and how to use the product. So please feel free to hit us up with all your hardest questions and I'll feel free to pass them along to Doreen as we go. So without any further ado, I'm going to share my screen so that we can just dive right in. So what we'll be covering today is a talking about why data even matters for your store, of course, introducing WIX analytics and giving you a great overview of our product. And then Doreen will talk to you about how you use WIX analytics to analyze your store's performance and also how you use those insights to plan ahead for your business. So let's start by just talking a little bit about why data even matters. So I know that as business owners, you have a lot to deal with and a lot in your head, and that numbers can be intimidating, but really what it's all about is understanding your business. And I think that when you think about that E commerce strategy at the highest level, you understanding your data and having those insights for your business can impact every decision you're making. So whether we're talking about audiences and channels, so knowing which users and which customers you're reaching and which channels you're using to reach them, I think E commerce is always an endless process of optimization and testing, and channels that might work for you today won't necessarily work for you tomorrow. So that's definitely something that you want to be aware of. You want to know which channels work best for your customers and your target audience base. Right. Where do they like to shop? How do they like to shop? What time of day do they like to shop? You always, always want to be thinking about that buyer journey, right? So that's how you turn visiting potential shoppers to your website into paying customers. And here you want to be really mindful of how every aspect of your website is performing. So how is your actual website performing, how are your product pages performing, how is your cart performing? And really how each individual product page works, if you think about e commerce. So unlike a brick and mortar business where customers get to come into your store and engage with you and with your products and they get to touch them and really feel them up close, in the world of E commerce, your customers have your website and that's where they get to meet you, your business and your product. And you really need to make sure that that website and those pages are working well and doing a good job in convincing shoppers that they want to buy from you. You of course want to be thinking about your fulfillment cycle. So leaving all logistics aside for a second, we also want to be really mindful of automations and how those are working for your business. So things like abandoned carts, have you turned on those automations to ensure abandoned cart recovery? How are those impacting your sales conversions for you? What other automations can you be using to convince those shoppers to keep buying from you again and again? And then finally, as you start to build up that customer base, you really want to be thinking about customer loyalty. So how do you keep bringing customers back? And here you want to be tracking everything, like your email marketing, thinking about how you're using retargeting to reach out to those shoppers again and again, again turning on those automations that we spoke about and even building loyalty programs. So once you start to think about all these things and then go to your data to see how it can help you understand them better and improve them and optimize them for your business? You want to be thinking about the differences between new shoppers versus engaged customers or customers who bought before. By looking at your data, you'll be able to see how those audiences behave differently. You want to think about your customer habits. So how do they shop and how do they visit your site during the holidays or different seasons, Days of the week, time of day, that's all stuff you'll be able to learn by looking at your data. What, what's the best time to reach out to them? When are they most active? And of course, which products get viewed the most, bought the most, added to cart the most? How's that changing over time? We all know we're having a crazy time this year. 2020 Covid is changing how everyone buys and shops online. So you definitely want to be looking into what your customers need now and which products they're buying buying most. So following that little overview there, I'm really happy to hand over to Doreen so she can introduce us to our amazing WIX Analytics.

So hi again and I want to start with a short video which will show you the report capabilities that we have.

Introducing reports by WIX analytics get valuable insights and turn them into business actions. With dozens of free, ready made customizable reports plus the ability to create your own, you can make better data driven decisions faster. Your business reports are presented according to key business parameters such as sales, traffic, behavior and people. Let's take a closer look at sales. Get an overview of your sales over time. Analyze your business trends, seasonality and their effects so you can optimize your strategy accordingly. You can learn a lot by comparing your sales performance for example year over year. Plus you can filter the reports according to the parameters that are most interesting for you. Now let's take a look at traffic and behavior reports. Learn where your website visitors are coming from, which pages they are interested in and where you lose them. Get the full picture of the people coming to your site. See how many people contacted you and who became a registered member. Measure loyalty trends and find out who your best and top paying customers are. The reports give you the flexibility to choose how you want to view your data. Choose from a line, chart, table, bar chart and more. You can trace back, compare and filter your data. You can personalize all reports by duplicating and editing them or create tailor made reports here. Ready Grow your business with WIX Analytics

Tickets so we're going to go back to reports a little bit later, but I want to start presenting you on what you see when you come to the WIX Dashboard when you encounter analytics for the first time. So this September we actually launched a new analytics widget on the desktop as a desktop widget and it has many new cool features. It has near real time data you can choose from various time frames including this week and this month. You can see the trend lines already from the dashboard so you can understand how you're doing and you can customize from an extensive list of KPIs which KPIs you're interested to see when you're coming to the WIX Dashboard. To pair with that, we also launched the analytics widget also on the mobile app so it's completely paired with the desktop widget. It has the same functionality so you can also track your performance on the go. Now let's say I want to dive a little bit deeper, I want to know more and I clicked on a KPI on the desktop and this is when I get to the overviews. Overviews are basically a collection of KPIs in a specific subject that are supposed to summarize your activity in this subject. Currently we have traffic, sales and people overviews and we're planning to launch more in the future and it just makes your data available at a glance with no need to dive more. Now let's say you do want to know more. This is when you get to reports. Currently we have 28 ready made reports across six categories and we just saw their amazing capabilities and I want to show you in a short video more closely on how you can take advantage of all the features that we have there. I can also get to know the reports page from the sidebar from the analytics and report section and let's say I want to explore my sales over time reports. So by default you see that we have less 30 days in the days, but you can choose from various predefined periods or you can choose a custom time period if you want to. By default we also compare to previous period, but you can compare to previous year or not to compare at all. You can choose which measure is shown on the graph. For example here I'm changing from revenue to orders and you can also split your data by interesting dimension. For example here I see that most of my sales are coming from new customers and not from returning customers. I can also see slides by other dimensions for example by payment method. And I see that most of my sales are coming from credit card. Now at the bottom of each report you have a button that says View in advanced mode. View in advanced mode exposes another little more icon where you can see many many filters that you can filter your data upon. So here for example I chose to filter billing region in California and boom. I see only my Californian based customer sales over time. So we saw a bit how you can slice and dice with the data in various ways and you can also take actions with the report. You can download a report in three formats, CSV, Excel or png and you can also subscribe to our report if you want to get it periodically to your email in a designated time and hour. So you won't have to go actively and check your stats. You just get them to your email. And then to even enhance this capability we recently launched alerts. So with alerts we notify you Whenever there's a significant change, positive or negative, in your traffic or sales. And soon we're going to launch also manual alerts where you can decide on a threshold. For example, I want to get an alert whenever sales are crossing the $1,000 a day. I can set it up on my own and I will get an email. Or you can choose whenever there's a decrease of 20% comparing to previous period then I can set it alert for that. So it's like really cool and helpful feature.

Amazing. So Doreen, before you continue to the next section, we have some questions from our users that I'd like to ask you. So first let me remind everybody we are recording this session. It will be available to you later on. You can access it from our WIX E commerce school. So Doreen, let's start with the hardest question of all. Everybody wants to know, do we have to pay for this feature?

So all WIX users get WIX analytics for the website for free, including all the advanced features we just discussed, subscribing to a report, downloading and all we just discussed, in order to duplicate and customize a report and create your own, you can upgrade to a business VIP plan.

Awesome. So basically only if I want to be creating custom reports, I need to do that upgrade to the VIP plan. And I will go ahead and remind everybody that of course to be running an e commerce site, you must have a premium plan in order to sell online. So we do recommend that you upgrade to your premium plan and connect your payment provider so that your site will be able to accept sales. Okay. So Doreen, one of our users is asking how can we see who has visited our website and when they visited.

So we'll be showing this in the presentation soon. But basically you can see many aspects about your visitors. You can see from which geo they're coming, which referrals, meaning where in the web they're coming from, in which time of day, in which day, weekday they are coming. However, we don't provide a visitor level data due to privacy reason, but we do provide all your paying customers data in the shopping behavior.

Great. So you definitely want to get to know your shoppers and of course your customers. And that's really important stuff to be looking at. Okay. Another interesting question. If I've never had any experience at all using either WIX or an analytics tool, do I need to get outside help or can I try and do it myself?

So we designed a product to provide a solution for everyone who are trying to understand their website performance. You can also choose on which level you want to consume the data. Like we saw in you can only see the dashboard stats, which are a number, and you can choose to dive deeper if you feel more comfortable and see the reports and see the overviews where it's more advanced. In addition, if you want to build your own report and you feel it's more complex, we have in our partner community people that can help with that. I also want to mention here that we're about to launch a really cool feature which we call a Report Helper, which will be on the side of each report. You'll have a summary of this report capability, what it's all about, what you can do about it, which insights you can gain from it. So it's also another feature that will really help you and not be afraid of analytics.

Awesome. So you got the spoiler alert there from Doreen and we'll bring her back to show that to you when it goes live. In the meantime, the team will share with you guys the link to our marketplace if you do need a partner to help build you custom reports. So another question, Doreen for you here is which analytical tool is more reliable and trustworthy than others?

So I'm going to refer to Google Analytics because I think this is the most common tool that people use. So wix have the most holistic view on your business. We have stores data, WIX events data, invoices, your contacts data, and we store this data and the data happens at wix. So we are the most reliable source for this kind of data. In Google Analytics you can find more demographic data that we currently don't offer. For example, you have their age and gender search terms that we currently don't offer. So you can still use this for Google Analytics for those purposes. And I also want to mention in this opportunity that we get from time to time questions about discrepancies between Google Analytics and wix Analytics. So there are many reasons why it can happen. It can be for example, time zone issues where you don't have the same time zone in both accounts, or it can be that AdBlock is blocking Wix and not blocking Google Analytics. So there are many, many reasons why you can see slight differences between both platforms.

Absolutely. So on that I'll add there, just off of personal experience, make sure that you're looking at when the data is last refreshed. Some platforms have different refresh rates, so there might be a lag there of a day or two. Definitely look at your time ranges, make sure that they're set the same. But really great trips tips there. Doreen. So I think on this section we're good and we can continue.

So on the next section I will try to guide you on how to get from seeing the data to actually interpreting it and understanding how you can gain insights and actions from it. So we are going to do it using an example like a real website, which is an office furniture store, it's a brick and mortar business, was founded 40 years ago and went online just recently after Covid. And it has companies from all sizes according to its website, from startup to Fortune 500s. And it has showrooms across different locations in the U.S. but it's headquartered in California. So before we dive into the numbers of this particular site, I just want to mention that I like to divide my questions about analytics to two types. We have monitoring questions that are more like how did my KPIs are comparing to previous period, which dates perform better than others, which referrals caused this change? And there are more exploration questions which are getting to know your traffic, which are when do visitors are usually coming, how do they reach me and where geographically are they located, etc. Etc. So we're going to start with the exploration questions and the first question that we're going to deal with is how do visitors reach my site? Which is a very common and basic question. So as we see here, this website traffic is coming mainly from direct, which is great because it means this site has high brand awareness. But I also see that there's also low social presence. So what I would suggest to this site is expanding to more channels, organic channels like social posts and wix, SEO Wiz. Because we also don't see Google here and also paid channels like Facebook and Google Ads. Another interesting question is where are visitors located? So here we see the traffic by location map where we see that most of the traffic is coming from the west coast, which makes sense because we just said that the company is headquartered in California. So what I would suggest to this business is now that they went online, they can consider targeting more locations across the U.S. another interesting question is when do visitors usually come? And I see here in both graphs that traffic is coming mainly on weekdays. I see clearly there's a weekly seasonality where I see a dip and I see an increase. And I do see that they come on business hours. They come approximately between 9 to 4pm so it also makes sense because it's a B2B and customers are shopping during business hours. And what I would suggest to this business is advertise during business hours, increase bids during business hours and also maybe they can add a blog and post mainly on Thursday and Friday mornings where I see it's more their most popular times. Another interesting question is where are buyers located? So you see here the traffic by location that we previously saw and we compare it to the sales by billing location and you see that Washington here is quite a small dot in traffic but it has a large customer base in sales. So I can deduct from it that conversion in Washington is high. So I would suggest to target Washington. Another very popular question that we get is who are my best customers? So what we see from the data that although it's a new site, I already see repeat purchases, I already see people that came more than once. And another thing I see that top paying customers in terms of dollars are not necessarily the ones who bought the most. So what I can do is I can offer one time customers coupon to turn them into returning customers by sending them email marketing and I can also offer returning customers coupon to increase their average order value and make them also top customers in terms of spend. Another very popular question is what are my best selling products? So we see here that the two best selling products account for more than 50% of the sales of this website. And another thing we see that the second product is actually trending so it has an increase of 17% this week comparing to previous week. So we can understand from that that we have many items that are barely bought if two items account for more than 50% of the sales. And we also need to ensure that the stock we are stocking up for the popularity of the second product.

Awesome. So before we continue, we have a few more questions from our audience about your previous section. So the first question that we're getting is how can I calculate LTV meaning lifetime value and how do I look at churn for my customers?

So I think those KPIs are more common for membership than E commerce. But we do have data that is relevant on this matter. Like we just saw, you can know how much customer is spent on a specific time frame. You can know your average order value from the sales overview and those two can really help you in marketing optimization and deciding on the bids you put on marketing campaigns.

Absolutely. I really agree that the average order value is the main KPI you're going to want to be looking at. I did notice before, by the way, someone asked us what KPI is. So it means key performance indicator. It's essentially the indicators that you're looking at to show you how your Business is performing. So I would say like Doreen average order value and not LTV on this one. Okay, next question. How do I know which customers are frequent and which customers don't come back?

So as we just saw, I would recommend also using the top paying customer reports and you can see there how many purchases a customer is made. And you can also like we said look on the average order value. You can filter only first time customers or returning customers depending on your needs.

Amazing. And another question, how do I use my information to optimize my site and content?

So I think it also relates to something we just discussed when we discussed about products and how you can optimize your storefront. For example, when you see the top two products and put them on the storefront or you can plan your inventory accordingly. One thing that I can think of more that is relevant to Covid as well is now that we see that many sites has a global expansion and they're seeing more geos, maybe you can look on your data and see that you're now having customers across many GEOs. So you should maybe consider adding multilingual support or maybe adding more shipping methods to encourage international customers.

Great tips. I think we're good on this section.

So we've discussed how you can understand your trend, how you can understand your data and explore and now we're going to discuss a bit on how you can monitor your data and understand better increases or decreases on your traffic sales. So here we are looking on a different website, a different example where we look only on the dashboard and we already see our stats here and we see that last seven days weren't great. We had a decrease of 25% in site sessions which is traffic. And we also had a bigger, a much bigger decrease in sales of 53%. So we want to investigate those two trends. Now let's start on why did traffic decrease. And here I have a few hypotheses in mind. When I think about it, maybe it's one referral that stopped bringing traffic to various reasons. Maybe the SEO, something with the SEO. Or maybe it's a specific campaign that's stopped bringing traffic. Or maybe it's just seasonality. Maybe we had a holiday this week or maybe business is slower at this time of year. So I'm going to click this KPI and I'm going to get to the traffic overview that we previously saw. So I quickly see here it's not a referral because I see that my both leading referrals decreased in an even way and I still Am not sure about seasonality and I want to dive a bit deeper. So this is where I get to my traffic over time report. I choose a longer time frame and I compare to last year because I want to see if it's a seasonal trend. And I see that October had a dip also last year. So I think my hypothesis is that the seasonality is more relevant here. Now let's jump in the other question and I think maybe the most interesting one is why did sales decrease more than traffic? And again here I have a few hypotheses. So maybe I shouldn't look on site session and I should look on unique visitors and in unique visitors I'll see the dip because I had less visitors with more retention. Or it's just a traffic quality matter. And I expect traffic quality to reflect in our average order value. People are buying less per order and I also expect average session duration to be shorter. So I'm going to go ahead and add those KPI straight to the dashboard. I'm going to explore it only from the dashboard and I quickly see here a few things. I see that unique visitors went down in the same similarly to site sessions. So it's not that, but I do see that they have a big deepen in average order value. And I also have a small dip here in average session duration. So I think my hypothesis regarding traffic quality is also more relevant and more correct here. And that's it.

Awesome. Wow, that was a really great example. So I do have a few more questions that I want to ask from our audience. So the first one is how can I understand changes in my customer behavior?

So I think this one is a really great one, especially like I mentioned with COVID because we see such great changes in behavior those days. One report that I think can help with this is Page visits. It's a report that we have under behavior category and there you can see for example changes in specific pages in your website comparing to previous period. So you can investigate more on why did you have this drop for example on one page? Is it specific referral that is not bringing traffic to this website? Is it coming from new visitors or returning visitors? Is it a geography thing? You can also do the same with sales if you look on the by product in the sales by item report and you can also slice and dice by geo by returning customers etc. I also want to mention here that in the near future we'll have also a feature that we call insights that will give you exactly this information without you needing to do anything. Meaning we'll analyze your data, we'll interpret it and then we'll provide you with insight and recommended action action items.

Wow, that's really amazing. I think, you know, it takes some time and practice to understand how to look at your data and to learn those insights. So that will be amazing and we will definitely have you back again to show that to us. But in the meantime, I think like take all of Doreen's advice, you guys have the session recorded so you can really go through on your analytics and take a look alongside her how you would look at the data for your business. And I think the idea is just investigate, explore, dive deeper until you figure out what's working and what's not. So I think in a similar from analytics,

so I think we partially answered analyze your traffic and sales data in order to understand the increases or decrease. One thing that we didn't mention, and I want to mention here and is sometimes overlooked is device because sometimes you change your strategy and you decide to invest more in mobile, for example. And mobile users are not the same as the desktop users. They have different intent. You're catching them in a different mode. So it's also important to track those changes in order to understand trends. And we have a dedicated report for traffic by device.

Absolutely. That's so important. And I think especially this year, going back to like how Covid is impacting people's shopping and buying behaviors, I think things that might have been typical for your shoppers in the past aren't necessarily the same this year. So being attentive to things like which devices they're using is super important. Well, this is a really interesting one. How often should I be using my analytics tools?

Wow. So I think it really, really depends on how you manage your business and how frequently you make changes in this period of time before the holidays and when you're making the sale. We advise to monitor more closely and also before or after you're launching a new campaign, before you're changing your website or changing the products that you're selling. So in sensitive periods, we offer to monitor more closely.

Before we wrap up today, I did want to remind everybody that we have recorded this entire session for you. So go ahead and go visit the WIX E Commerce School. You can watch this recording as well as all of our other workshops at your convenience. And we also invite you to please join our WIX E Commerce community. We have a forum as well as a Facebook group, so you're welcome to join us there. Our team is always available to you there as well. As many, many other sellers and merchants like yourselves. So the links are here. The team will drop them in the chat for you guys. And before we go ahead and say goodbye today, I'm going to ask Doreen for you know, we're mid holiday season, everyone's ramping up sales and really dealing with all the orders and fulfillment challenges coming in. So what is your holiday season tip to our audience?

So I think my advice won't be very surprising, but I would let analytics be the pulse of your business, especially in those days you're not North Star. And I would do that in all the phases. When you plan your campaign and you do what we did today and explore the behavior of your customers, especially if you have your previous year, the previous holiday season behavior, it's great. Otherwise I would explore my recent activity and also during the campaign I would monitor closely how am I doing. We have near real time data. You can constantly refresh it and I would check how my campaigns are doing and I would push harder on campaigns that are successful and maybe rearrange my products if I see that one product is selling more than I expected. And just monitor all the time during this season and also afterwards, I would use this to learn better on how to recreate the success that I guess after this workshop you're sure to have.

Well, listen to her. She's a smart lady. I can tell you. One of our favorite analysts at wix. Thank you so much, Doreen for joining us and sharing with us today. And to all of our audience, thank you for joining us. We wish you happy holidays and most importantly, happy holiday sales.