How Online Businesses Can Track Holiday Selling Data for Long-Term Success

By guest author Megan Conley, staff writer at Bigcommerce.

No matter the industry, today’s most successful online businesses rely on data to make each of their merchandising and marketing decisions. This holiday season, don’t wait until the year’s end to evaluate the success of your business strategy. By tracking analytics throughout the planning and execution process, you will be able to make tweaks to your selling strategy and be confident that it’s rooted in real-time results.

To help you see growth that lasts beyond this holiday shopping season and into the new year, we’ve gathered a few practical steps to help you make calculated decisions about your business growth strategy.

Set up Conversion Goals

Before the holiday shopping season reaches its peak, take the time to set conversion goals for your main landing pages and content. A conversion goal is the measurement of a user’s action on your site, such as clicking on a link or making a purchase. This way, you’ll be able to monitor the visibility of your promotions and how consumers are engaging with them.

With Google Analytics, you can create goals to help you keep tabs on certain measurements. For example, use destination goals to track when website users complete an action, such as signing up for an email newsletter. Use duration goals to monitor when a user’s visit exceeds or falls below your set threshold.

Track Your Campaigns and Content

Although it is important to link to your promotions on as many strategic locations as possible, this can make evaluating the various entry points of your funnel challenging. With custom campaign tracking, however, you can evaluate the success of your promotions on a page-by-page basis.

Use Google’s URL Builder to create UTM tags for the links you will use in each of your email and advertising campaigns. A UTM code is a simple code that you can attach to a custom URL in order to track a source, medium, and campaign name. This way, once you are in Google Analytics, you can distinguish clicks from your follow-up email versus your final reminder email, or your banner ad on one page versus your banner ad on another.

Allow Data to Drive Your Decisions

Productivity is key for any small online business looking to scale quickly and sustain that growth long-term. With Bigcommerce’s enterprise-grade analytics reports, online sellers of any size can review all of their metrics in one place for no extra cost, taking the mystery out of data-driven decisions.

Even if you find yourself late in the game of holiday preparations, setting up conversion goals and monitoring your purchase funnel will save time and energy for next year’s top selling season. Be sure to keep tabs on your analytics for the rest of the year and increase merchandising for those products selling well, decreasing inventory for those that go cold.

Then, continuously update your online merchandising based on these wins and losses.

In all, holiday selling success stories are not made in a few weeks — they are the results of months of planning, and bring growth and customer loyalty that lasts long after the year ends.

This article was originally published on the Bigcommerce blog.

About The Author:

Megan Conley is a staff writer at Bigcommerce, where she covers ecommerce news and strategy. She is a graduate of Miami University with degrees in journalism and professional writing.