A successful ecommerce website requires so much more than snappy product descriptions and a secure checkout system. If you aren’t constantly thinking about how to maximize conversions, attract more targeted traffic and one-up your biggest competitors, you probably aren’t making the sales that your site is capable of making. Thankfully, there are many ecommerce tools that help you bring your website to maximum profits.

This is a three-part series packed with e-commerce tips designed to help experienced and new ecommerce site owners. This first part will cover some analytical ecommerce tools that will help you keep tabs on your site so that you know what is working for you, what could work better, and what is not working at all. Without this insight, it is difficult to maximize conversions.

The Google Analytics ecommerce tool is probably your go-to for site analysis, unless you have an extremely high-traffic site. You probably already know how to use the basic features of Google’s tool, but there are a few advanced features that you may not be aware of yet.

Advanced Segment Analysis

When you run Google Analytics with its default settings, your results are based on all data available for your site. This includes all of your customers regardless of location and all referrers regardless of the quality they provide in their referrals. If you want to look at smaller segments, such as customers from the United States or the UK only, you have to use advanced segment analysis.

If you know that customers from a specific location tend to buy different products than customers from another location, that will affect your advertising strategies. If you discover that the leads coming in from one referrer are always low quality, you can take action on that.

Customized Reports

Do you get valuable, insightful information from the standard reports delivered by Google? Most site owners find those reports lacking, but customization is the solution to the problem. You select what information you want in your custom report and what data you want included. This turns a useless report into something useful.

Advanced Filtration

You may already know about this e-commerce tip, but many people aren’t aware of the advanced filter settings on Google Analytics. Scroll to the bottom of the results when looking at your analytics, and find the advanced filter button. You can select some categories of data to eliminate from your results in order to reduce the number of results delivered.

Filtering allows you to narrow your results down to the exact information you want to view. It also makes your results much easier to comprehend and process.

Analytical Intelligence

Analytics become time-consuming if you have to set up customized reports for every little detail you want to track from bounce rates to sales. If you have to compare reports in attempt to track changes affecting your site, you will spend more time finding problems and not enough time fixing those problems. Intelligence is your solution.

This feature will send you alerts when important trends are detected on your site. For example, if your visitors suddenly stop sticking around for more than a second or two, you will receive a notification about the change in bounce rate for the site.

For many site owners, these e-commerce tips are effective enough to keep tabs on a site. If you need more advanced or in-depth analysis, there are other analytical ecommerce tools out there, such as Clicky.

Are you ready to tap into the power of visualization? Look out for the next part in this series.