Why Performance Reporting is a Priority for Ecommerce Stores

For forward thinking, competitive ecommerce businesses, the days of compiling reports, scouring Excel sheets and cross checking multiple dashboards are over.  In order to expand business and grow revenue, online retailers are turning to advanced performance reporting capabilities. Performance reports bring together information from your ecommerce platform, advertising sources and analytics tools to help you understand critical metrics across your business to maximize profitability.  These reports not only give you a real time snapshot of the health of your business, they also show trends and red flags that need attention.  Performance reporting gives you insight into the following key performance indicators every store must measure, understand and act upon:

Net Profit

Without the ability to combine siloed data in a comprehensive performance report, stores are left switching between Google Analytics, social dashboards and ecommerce platforms to get the answers. That’s a lot of time and a lot of logging in and out.  Advanced performance reports give you a straightforward look at profitability by channel in one, easy to view dashboard. While revenue is important, big numbers don’t mean much without the context of profitability. This is a critical metric for deciding where your profits are coming from and how to spend future budgets.

Revenue by Channel

Do you know where your customers are coming from and how much they spent in your ecommerce store? This is vital data in order to understand how you are gaining customers, where they initially came from and how much each channel is worth to your store in the long run.  Without performance reports that pull data from Google Analytics and source each customer back to the original sale, it’s difficult to determine exactly which channels your revenue is coming from. That means you could be wasting precious time and money on channels that aren’t bringing in buying customers. Calculating Revenue by Channel involves pulling data from Google Analytics, your shopping cart and all platforms you advertise on.

Customer Acquisition Costs

The cost of customer acquisition is a critical metric you need to determine how to grow and maintain ecommerce profitability. The simple calculation of customer acquisition costs is the average amount of sales and marketing costs you invest to acquire a single customer.  Acquisition costs across your marketing channels are measurable if you are tracking and analyzing customer data. But without performance reports, it’s a cumbersome journey to make these calculations on a daily basis.  Performance reports allow you to quickly understand how much it costs to acquire customers across each channel. Armed with this information, you can reduce the money spent on acquiring low lifetime value customers and optimize spend on high value buyers.

Store Performance Reports in Glew

With all ecommerce stores have to keep track of, understanding which key performance indicators are important and then how to analyze each one can be overwhelming.  Glew does the work for you by pulling together data from the strongest indicators of performance from your ecommerce platform, advertising channels and Google Analytics.  The result is an intuitive dashboard that gives you real-time insight into store performance. Think of it as your home base for understanding the money that is flowing in and out of your store.  Performance Reporting in Glew gives you a snapshot of your most important Key Performance Indicators, including Gross Revenue, Sales Margin, Gross Profit, Advertising Spend and Net Profit.  

 Glew also allows users to compare individual metrics to specific dates. This is useful to help you compare the performance of campaigns or gaining insight into variances between different times of the year.  

 There is also a period over period, which is customizable, and year of year comparison for each metrics.  Glew’s performance reports include revenue by channel, which shows a monthly breakdown of the last 13 months and how each marketing channel performed.  

 Glew also includes insight into Net Profit by Channel. The dashboard shows channel level revenue, cost of goods sold, gross profit, gross margin, advertising spend, net profit and profit margin.  Understanding net profit by channel will help you take into account how much it costs to produce a product and sell it on each channel. Then, you can funnel your budget to your highest performing channels.  If you’re feeling overwhelmed with spreadsheets, statistics and multiple platforms, it may be time to consider an advanced ecommerce tool that will pull it all together for you. Platforms like Glew not only reduce the time and stress it takes to pull out information, it brings it to you in a way that’s easy to digest and act upon.

Free Trial

Want to get started now? No problem. Glew integrates with your store in just a few minutes. Start your no-risk free trial today.