Retail Businesses Can Thrive This Holiday Shopping Season By Analyzing Clickstream Data

The holiday shopping season is the busiest time of year for retailers, and it’s also a time when they have access to the most information about their customers’ online behavior. If you’re a retailer with an e-commerce site, you can use clickstream data to understand your customers better and boost sales during this crucial time of year.

What Is Clickstream Data?

Most retailers are familiar with clickstream data – even if they don’t realize it. Retailers commonly use this data to track a shopper’s progress from a search to a purchase. Retailers can use clickstream data and analytics to collect, analyze, and report aggregate data about which pages a shopper visits and in what order. An online shopper’s journey through a website is known as their clickstream.

Nowadays, most retailers have tracking technology installed on their sites that autonomously records all this data.

How Retailers Can Use Clickstream Data

Clickstream data is a treasure trove of information for retailers, who can use it to find out what their customers want and are looking for. Retailers can use clickstream data to optimize their website, increase sales, improve a product or service, understand user behavior, and track marketing efforts.

In general, it’s good practice to analyze factors like:

• How long do customers stay on your website before exiting or performing another action (e.g., adding something to their cart)?
• Which pages are most popular with visitors, and which ones get ignored?
• What links do shoppers tend to click on most often?
• How did a shopper encounter your website? Was it from a search engine result?

While a single user’s clickstream data may not be helpful, you can begin to uncover trends and draw conclusions about different metrics when you aggregate data from millions and millions of users. Aggregating this data helps to understand website performance by viewing and analyzing statistics. For example, retailers can harness clickstream data throughout the holiday shopping season to identify which products and brands are the most popular.

Adopting A Data Notebook To Comprehend Data

Raw clickstream data can be hard to work with and intimidating, but that’s where the insights are. Simple tools like Google Analytics have built-in views for examining user flow but are limited in functionality and keep you from plugging in your data.

“Data notebooks allow you to navigate clickstream data with more power and flexibility. Notebooks allow you to filter and transform clickstream data to an organized format and understand it. With notebooks, you can view the data from any angle, with rich tables or sophisticated data visualization. For example, you can drill down to specific paths and segments, allowing you to filter by the region your shoppers are coming from, the time of day users are shopping, or whether their visit ended in success or frustration. A data notebook will let retailers define cohorts, describe happy paths, and visualize the data in any way they need,” explains Pierre Brunelle, CEO, and co-founder of Noteable, the innovative data notebook platform for data-driven teams. Pierre also served as the head of data at Amazon.

The holidays are a great time for retail businesses to leverage the information they collect from their customers’ online behavior. Mobile commerce platforms, like Tapcart, that enable Shopify-powered brands to launch mobile apps have recognized the value of clickstream data. As a result, many have launched features that allow retailers to see the source of their orders, app installation rates, top searched items, and more.

“Our best merchants continuously study and optimize their customers’ shopping journey. In a world of high acquisition costs, driving retention with highly relevant and engaging experiences is more critical than ever,” says Eric Netsch, CEO and founder of Tapcart, the leading no-code app builder for Shopify stores. “The wealth of data captured in the mobile app informs better strategy, unlocks better personalization, and leads to better outcomes for merchants and consumers.”

With clickstream data, retailers can gain insights into holiday shopping trends and better understand what their audiences are looking for. This data can also help you improve your marketing strategies and increase sales during this critical period. The trick is to start collecting and analyzing this data throughout the year to understand your customers’ behavior before the peak shopping season.