What Analytics does Salesforce Commerce Cloud Provide?

Answer

The art of mining data to reveal statistical diamonds, analytics plays a core function in the business strategy of every seriously-minded company. And like real-life mining, it’s a difficult and arduous task to get to the good stuff. Although, unlike the rough and often horrifying conditions of mineral mining, you’ll be in a privileged position, at the office desk, or — at least in these quarantine days — on your couch lying down with your pajamas on.

Analytics at its optimal provides excellent patterns and meaningful data that can be translated into effective marketing strategies and an accurate presentation of your customers and their behavior. Given its core function in the business ecosystem, today’s leaders use advanced analytics to edge ahead and keep their position at the forefront.

At its prime performance — like the technical wizardry of Lionel Messi with a soccer ball — analytics allows excellent response to market changes and consumer movements.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud comes with its own analytics already built in, which means that you don’t need to pay extra for analytic extensions. So what are these analytical functionalities of this powerful ecommerce platform? Let’s take a look.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud captures data when users visit your website, and stores it for you so that you are able to run a whole host of reports from sales and promotions to traffic and performances of testing. Let’s look at each one. And it’s worth remembering that, for data to become meaningful, look at correlations between the metrics and finite numbers like revenue or the number of orders. Because the core of analytics is to reveal trends over time.

Conversion Reports

Here you can view data on your conversion rates, which are percentages of visitors that complete a “conversion”, that is, a specific goal that you determine, out of the total number of visitors. The most common of these include: cart conversion, which is the rate of shoppers that put your products in a cart against the total number of visitors; and checkout conversion, which is the amount of visitors that go through checkout against total numbers of visitors.

Purchase Reports

These reports allow you to analyze the amount of orders and revenue that is incoming. Beyond this, you’ll also get access to the averages of a number of indices such as the average revenue, the average order, as well as the ordered products.

Catalog Reports

Here you can check out data regarding the top products on your website. This is measured in two different ways: the first is by the quantity of a product that is sold, and the second is by the revenue that is brought in by a product. For example, perhaps your black coffee cups are your most popular product that you sell the most of; but your glass coffee makers, while selling less in quantity, actually bring in the most revenue.

Traffic Reports

This includes core information such as the most visited pages on your website, the top referrers to your site, total requests, total visits and the visit duration of customers.

Customer Reports

The data here focuses on the total number of registered customers, the number of first-time buyers on your website, and the number of new customers.

Search and Navigation Reports

The data that is located here regards the top search terms that customers are typing, as well as the top search engines that are referring these potential customers.

A/B Testing Reports

This provides the performance overview of any A/B testing that you have been doing on your website. This type of test allows you to show one particular customer experience to one group, while showing an alternative version of your site to another group. You’ll get access to data on metrics such as group segmentation and differences in conversion rates.

These are the core analytics features that Salesforce Commerce Cloud provides out of the box. One key point to make here is that it captures data via a visitor’s session ID, which is a unique number that a website’s server gives a specific visitor, and this number is kept for the duration of their visit. This is important to know because it means that you won’t be able to distinguish between the total number of visits and the unique visitors.

Commerce Cloud also collects data via weblogs that captures visitor activities on the website. And that net which captures this data can only be thrown so far. Data that reaches beyond the payment process can’t be brought into view, such as order cancellations or order modifications. Such data will need to be identified using extensions.

PS: UV is one of the world’s leading Salesforce Commerce Cloud (Demandware) specialists. Contact us to see how we can work together.