WooCommerce customer analytics: what it is and why it matters
Today we are going to look into WooCommerce customer analytics. We’ll understand the basic concepts about user analytics, what you should measure and how to do that. We’ll also check how to build and extract the perfect KPIs for your store. By the end of the day you should be able to fully understand your user analytics and create your own metrics and reports.
In all industries knowledge about your customers is a valuable asset. By understanding your user base, you’ll be able to provide them better products and services. Additionally, once you know their behaviors, you can provide them complimentary products. Another good use of these metrics is by providing your users new solutions that they haven’t even thought of.
All in all, once you measure the right indicators you’ll be able to perform these actions and much more.
So in this article we’ll break these elements down and check each of them in detail. Here are the main topics that we are going to talk about:
- WooCommerce Customer Analytics
- Key Performance Indicators
- Marketing & Sales KPIs
- Service Costs KPIs
- Keeping track of your KPIs
Let’s get started!
WooCommerce Customer Analytics
Customer analytics are methods we create to better understand our clients. Online stores have a big advantage over brick and mortar business on this matter, as collecting stats is much easier. Most data can be collected and manipulated with no need of user interaction. Additionally, with digital data you are able to perform complex tasks with your information such as building reports and creating custom metrics and custom dashboards.
When defining the set of analytics you’ll measure, there are a few key components to take into account. The first element is the information you want. For example, if you want to know your revenue you can just look at sales. But there are some information points that are harder to convert into metrics.
If you want to get to the best customer segment, for example, the right stat depends on which business aspect you consider the best. Some customers will give you a higher sales volume. Some will give you higher profit margins. And your goals may change over time. So the right metrics should evolve accordingly.
Another thing you need to take into account are the limits of a direct approach. Finding only direct metrics will only give you the simplest information. Some correlations may be hidden into other connections that you can only find if you allow yourself to do so.
There are products that are brought together and certain purchase habits that only an open exploration will help you find. For example, you may find that customers from a certain city buy more in a certain day of the week, while customers from a different city buy in another. Or you may notice that users who bought a certain brand would only buy matching products from the same brand. The possible correlations are infinite, and each store owner must find out what is going to work for their store.
Key Performance Indicators
Before getting into each possible metric you could make use of, let’s take a look at how we measure them, the KPIs. Key Performance Indicators are measurable values that will help you understand whether you are achieving your business goals.
The ideal scenario would be measuring everything you can, but today we are going to focus on customer and user-related KPIs. The KPIs should be very specific, and often the KPIs of a department are composed of smaller and smaller KPIs. In this way in order to increase sales, for example, you know that you need to increase the number of leads generated via Twitter. In this case leads generated via Twitter is the smallest KPI, which may contribute to your overall social media leads. This KPI will contribute to the leads KPI and that will help you figure out your overall leads per sale KPI.
Therefore you’re building a big tree of metrics, and you know exactly which actions you need to take in order to reach your goals. “Increasing Twitter leads generation”, for example, is a goal much easier to achieve than just “increase sales”.
Now let’s take a look at some options when it comes to measuring your WooCommerce customer analytics.
Marketing & Sales KPIs
You can look into general store results by looking at your WooCommerce metrics. But looking into your registered WooCommerce users will give you a whole new idea about your performance. By looking at the customer data, you’ll be able to track their own behavior individually or in group. This way it’s much easier to take defined actions to improve your performance.
For example, you may use Users Insights and make the orders column visible. In this way you’ll have a quick overview of all your customer orders.
This allows you to export your data, and then you can create metrics such as the repeat purchase ratio. To get to this figure you just need to divide the total number of customers (126 in our example) by the number of customers who made more than one purchase
In our example it’s 115, so a total of 91.26% of repeat buyers. You can check more details about this metric in our article “How to calculate your repeat purchase rate in WooCommerce“.
It’s also very important to know the aggregated purchases of a customer. This can be measured with the lifetime value column.
It’s possible to assign different groups to these valuable customers, or look into more details about them so you can see how to find more similar customers.
Another idea of a good metric is measuring the order gap or inactivity time. The order gap is how long it takes for a repeat buyer to buy again. We have more details about how to get this metric in our “How to find your best WooCommerce customers” guide. But in short you’ll need to measure the amount of orders each customer has over time using the export function, in order to find out when the sales go up.
On the other hand, the inactivity time measures how long it has been since the last order you’re your customers. In this way you can try to revive inactive customers, and you can also reward the most recent ones.
If you have some custom fields for your registration form it’s possible to make use of them in your KPIs. You could, for example, group all users from a certain job title so you’ll know that customer segment value in particular.
The same rules applies to other fields such as company name, company size, industry.
And last but not least let’s talk about location. By using the geolocation module in Users Insights you’ll be able to collect location data from your users. This way you can use location as a modifier of all your KPIs.
Thus, it’s possible to check the number of customers from a certain location. But it’s also possible to check the number of repeat buyers of each location:
You could check the most profitable location by checking the lifetime value. There are also some other metrics you can use, as the language, that can group multiple locations and give you a better understanding of that niche.
Service Costs KPIs
It’s great to know your company-wide costs. But it’s a great idea also to analyze the costs linked to each of your WooCommerce customers. Usually the product-related costs are fixed, so a product will have the same cost no matter which client is buying it. When it comes to services that’s a different story, each customer will have their own demands for services.
For instance, support and delivery costs are very likely to be unique to each customer. Therefore it would be a good idea to keep track of these values for your customers.
First let’s take a look at the support costs. We have a guide on how to find your support costs in case you want more details. We’ll be using bbPress, it’s a forums system that is very widely used. But the same technique will work for other systems.
In short, you need to find your cost per reply, then multiply that by the number of replies each customer gets. This can be done by making the replies column visible:
You can compare the amount of support provided with the customer lifetime value. This will give you a rough idea of how much that customer may be leaving in revenue.
This can also help you identify the most expensive customers, so you can act accordingly. You can provide them better training, premium support options and other methods to bring down these costs.
Regarding the delivery costs, we don’t have them at hand, but these can be stored via custom fields or using your customer notes.
If you have them as a note it’s possible to use some custom code and show them as a column. This requires some programming knowledge, but it’s very worth it as you can analyze how heavily the delivery costs impact your prices.
Keeping track of your KPIs
Now you know how to properly measure your Woocommerce metrics and KPIs. You need a reliable way of keeping track of this data.
The easiest way to do that is using the export tool of Users Insights
You just need to make sure to do this once a month, week or whatever period suits you the best. In this way you can not only measure your stats, but also how your actions are interfering with them. It’s possible, for example, to know that a certain action reduced your support cost in 10% in one month.
Once you have a timeline of your KPIs you can plot them to easily see how they are evolving.
Conclusion
Today we talked about WooCommerce customer analytics. We looked into different ways to track your customer KPIs and how important they are. We also saw some different methods of collecting this data, and how you can create your own KPIs.
Now you should be able to better measure your user stats, which can also give you ideas on how to better reach your business goals.
We hope you enjoyed this article, and see you next time!