Heading to IRX? Catch our panel on data-driven ecommerce strategies

Last year, there were discussions about Google Analytics transitioning users to Google Analytics 4, as Universal Analytics was going to be phased out completely. This shift towards event-based reporting instead of session-based reporting was not entirely new to brands that rely on data for analysis, reporting, and retargeting customers. Littledata has been working with brands that have been utilizing granular event-based data for some time now to enhance the user journey and increase conversions. This highlights the importance of subscription data in improving business outcomes. Adapting to Google Analytics 4 (GA4) will require some adjustment, as with any new tool. Although it has a distinct appearance and user experience, it offers even greater capabilities for ecommerce managers. Littledata’s app connects automatically with BigCommerce and Shopify and Shopify Plus merchants to ensure precise subscription data in GA4, and in this article, I will outline the most beneficial features they have discovered thus far. Event based tracking Event-based tracking in GA4 captures specific actions or events on a website or app, providing more detailed data about user behavior than Universal Analytics, which focused on sessions and pageviews. This includes clicks, scroll depth, form submissions, video plays, and more. See Google’s full list of events that are tracked automatically.  Implementing event-based tracking in GA4 can help businesses understand user behavior and engagement, optimize their website, identify growth opportunities, and make data-driven decisions to improve their bottom line. This includes highlighting products and product groups based on granular browsing data captured through event tracking.  Automatically tracked events do not include important ecommerce actions like purchases, subscriptions, and refunds. Shopify's Google sales channel also does not provide complete tracking. Ecommerce sites need a custom setup or automated server-side tracking to ensure accurate conversion tracking. If you are using Skio events captured can be very useful for campaigns—for example using specific events to trigger workflows in Klayvio to drive higher engagement and AOV.  Flexible reporting GA4 has new features including no event collection limits, cross web + app tracking, explorations, and faster reporting. An early limitation was reporting, but Google has added an Explorations tab that makes it easy to deep dive into data by channels or demographics. Popular exploration types include free-form, funnel, and path. Creating an exploration by dimensions, metrics, or segments is now easier. Creating these for your unique subscription types, segments, or product types can do wonders for diving into data for analysis right in GA4. Remembering that the accurate data captured is key to the results.  The phrase garbage in garbage out applies here when you are only using client-side tracking or native store tracking. Littledata has gone to great lengths to enable merchants to have accurate data stitched together with server-side tracking so that the information you have in GA4 can be your single source of truth.  As mentioned, it takes time to learn a new tool but the Littledata team has made it incredibly easy with free GA4 courses that walk you through how to build your own ecommerce reports in GA4.  Here are our three popular setup videos for ecommerce reports in GA4: Sales performance report Checkout behavior report Creating segments for subscriptions Knowing how customers discover and interact with your brand can help with customer retention and acquisition. Identifying successful channels that drive subscriptions and high AOV can help ecommerce managers predict and allocate resources effectively. Streamlined audience building Google is encouraging users to link their Google Ad's account to GA4, which is seen as a better option than Universal Analytics in the long run. This will provide merchants with a direct view of the customer journey and allow them to create audiences from any combination of dimensions, metrics, and events found in GA4.  Google will automatically make two audiences for users based on purchases and all users, making audience building easier. Similar audiences or segments will be faded out by May 1st, 2023, to enable users to shift to using first-party data and Google's optimized targeting feature.  Littledata customers have been using their data to create audiences for years, and this connection is now even more important as GA4 data will guide Google Ad campaigns. The best part of sending this data directly to GA4 is that you will have the historical data from the time of implementation. Given that Google Analytics is not going anywhere this also gives brands piece of mind even if they are using alternative third party tools like Glew, Daasity, or Triple Whale to send their data for reporting purposes. Littledata benefits Skio brands by working with server-side tracking and third party integrations — helping sort out that the data is accurate and deduped before it reaches your GA4, Meta, TikTok, or Pinterest destinations giving you maximum control over your data for making better decisions.   Export raw data to BigQuery The ability to export from Google Analytics 4 (GA4) directly to BigQuery has opened up new possibilities for ecommerce managers to take their data analysis to the next level.The integration of Google Analytics 4 (GA4) with BigQuery has provided ecommerce managers with fresh opportunities to enhance their data analysis. Previously, these users were dependent on a GA360 account to obtain raw, row-level data and create unsampled reports or run their own algorithms. But now, with GA4 + BigQuery, users can access these features without requiring a GA360 account. This ability is particularly beneficial for ecommerce businesses, as it offers a robust data warehouse solution and provides an insurance policy for brands that want to own their own data for future analysis. With GA4 + BigQuery, users can harness the power of raw, row-level data to gain deeper insights into customer behavior, identify new opportunities, and optimize their marketing strategies. Ultimately, this new ability is a game-changer for businesses that want to take control of their data and leverage it to drive growth and success. Many brands are sending their data to GA4 from GA4 to BigQuery as a precautionary measure, even if they are not yet prepared to utilize or examine it in BigQuery. Reasons very but for the majority of brands they want the data collected and stored, so it is accessible in the future. Therefore, we highly suggest that anyone considering a data warehouse should begin using both BigQuery and GA4.  Third party apps are prioritizing GA4  GA4 only weeks away from being THE ANALYTICS TOOL — with sunsetting of Universal Analytics in July 2023 — for online merchants and brands. Providing more event based data than ever before that stands on privacy, first party data, and server-side tracking. Littledata helps top subscription brands track their data from Shopify and BigCommerce into GA4, ensuring accurate data and analytics by combining server-side and client-side tracking to combat cookie blockers from iOS updates and new privacy rollouts. Subscription tools like our partners at Skio come highly recommended by brands in all product vertical types: life food and beverage, fitness and health, and fashion. Having a tool like Skio to drive brand loyalty through new and robust subscription features is key for any brand looking to grow. Pairing this with Littledata for your conversion tracking into GA4 is the perfect way to level up your insights and data acumen. The benefit is that Littledata supports server-side tracking for brands to track all orders and give visibility to if those orders are one-time orders or recurring.  This adds tremendous value to subscription brands who want to drive campaigns based on high LTV and AOV—through accurate subscription data that can be missed completely with native tracking efforts or client-side tracking alone. For example, Littledata calculates LTV for brands automatically and sends it to your destinations like Google Analytics where you can filter by channel.  We've chatted with current and future Skio customers who rave about their platform for brands to drive more customer engagement and features to manage subscriptions. By combining Littledata with Skio you will get the most complete view and best attribution. Enabling you to take full advantage of the launch of Google Analytics 4 without the hassle of implementation or data maintence. Curious if you have any data tracking discrepancies?  Check out our free tool, GA4 Conversions Checker, to see if your ecommerce store is tracking the data properly, here. Or you can install Littledata instantly by connecting your store for a 30 day free trial. 

LTV, or customer lifetime value, is a key metric in ecommerce that measures the total amount of revenue a customer has generated for a brand. Merchants knowing their LTV is important because it allows ecommerce businesses to make better decisions about customer acquisition, retention, and pricing. In this article we partnered up with Swanky to give you a breakdown on how you can do this yourself. Before we dive in though — here are some specific reasons why LTV is important in ecommerce: 🎯 Better customer acquisition decisions: Brands are looking to stretch their budgets and get the most out of their ad dollars. Knowing the LTV of customers can help merchants build audiences or target look-a-like audiences that are more likely to engage and buy again. One example is when merchants know the LTV of their customers is high, they generally are willing to spend more money upfront to acquire them because they know they will generate more revenue over time from that customer. 🛍 Improved customer retention: Understanding LTV can also help ecommerce merchants grow and improve their customer retention. By identifying customers with a high LTV brands can create targeted retention strategies or campaigns to keep these customers engaged and coming back for more. We share some ways to take action on this below. 💸 Pricing decisions: LTV can also help brands make better pricing decisions. If the LTV of customers is low, brands may need to lower their prices to remain competitive and attract more customers or build a strategy to move those customers to a higher AOV or priced product. On the other hand, if the LTV is high, merchants may be able to charge a premium price or offer a subscription because customers are willing to pay more. These are great things to A/B test on your website or ad campaigns to see how your low or high LTV customers respond.  Overall, LTV is a critical metric for ecommerce businesses to track. The Littledata app does automatically through our Shopify/BigCommerce to Google Analytics 4 connection. Which provides valuable insights through accurate attribution that shows customer behaviour and lifecycle events. This tracking helps merchants analyse and create action plans for their customer acquisition, retention, and pricing. What LTV tracking looks like in action by setting up an audience based on high customer values Recently we caught up with Tom Cox of Swanky, a leading Shopify Plus agency with offices in the UK, Australia & France who said, “By tracking CLTV, you can see which customers are generating the most value for your business. This information can be used to target your marketing efforts and sales strategies more effectively. Importantly, identifying high value customers makes it easier to target them with marketing campaigns.” LTV is an important focus for Swanky and their clients but how do they execute?  Here is one way they use Littledata to drive their LTV efforts in Google Analytics 4: 1. Create custom dimensions in GA4 to report on Customer Lifetime value of users ( https://help.littledata.io/posts/customer-lifetime-value-google-analytics/) 2. Calculate the LTV of your top 10% of customers. 3. Create an audience in GA4 by going to Admin → Audiences → New Audience 4. In the audience definition, choose the parameter lifetime_revenue_littledata 5. Then using the LTV figure you calculated earlier, specify a filter to only include users whose LTV is higher than that value 6. You can now use this audience to sync to Google Ads, and also understand which channel acquired those customers. Using behaviour reports, funnels and path exploration reports you can observe how valuable customers are interacting with your brand There are several reasons how this targeting can really fuel growth for brands but as we’ve seen the global market dictate—brands are focusing heavily on their customer retention rates this year. On the topic of retention Tom said, “By understanding why high value customers have churned, you can take steps to prevent them from leaving.” tactics like, “loyalty programs, improving customer service experiences, and providing more personalised marketing” you can really move the needle.  If you’ve yet to create an audience using the handy walkthrough above now is the time to give it a go. Merchants who know their customers LTV and can attribute the channels they are coming from such as organic or paid performance like Google, Facebook, Pinterest, and TikTok ads will have an edge on retargeting and creating lookalike audiences based on accurate data and analytics.   How LTV and CAC enables better decision making  No matter how good your customer acquisition strategy is, all marketers are looking to increase LTV of their customers and decrease Cost of Acquisition Costs or CAC for short. For those new to the term it is the total cost that a business incurs to acquire a new customer. It can be calculated by dividing the total cost of acquiring new customer over a specific period (such as a month or a quarter) by the number of new customers acquired during that same period. This will give you the average cost of acquiring a single new customer. For example, if a DTC brand spends $10,000 on marketing and sales activities in a month, and acquires 100 new customers during that same period, the CAC would be $100 ($10,000 / 100). This is a big topic among marketers looking to optimize their existing channels and ad spend. When chatting about CAC Tom mentioned, “by knowing how much it costs to acquire a new customer, you can make more informed decisions on how to allocate your marketing budget” and as many marketers know running campaigns proof is in the pudding when it comes to forecasting and maintaining ad budgets in any organization.  Tom recommends those using Littledata to head over to GA4 and use the parameter purchase_count_littledata that is automatically generated by Littledata’s tracking script!  1. Create custom dimensions in GA4 to report on purchase_count_littledata parameter ( https://help.littledata.io/posts/customer-lifetime-value-google-analytics/) 2. In most standard reports, there is an option to “Add comparison” 3. Then choose the purchase_count_littledata dimension (that you created earlier), and choose dimension value 1 to select only new customers. 4. The report will now show the comparison between the segments you have created Knowing the costs and the channels that contribute to that first time customer can be an incredibly powerful tool and insight to campaign management, acquisition strategies, and a/b testing of new tactics or channels. There is a fine line betweening knowing your channels which many marketers do—and having the data to back it up!  A few points to take away on the importance of CAC for your brand: Helps measure effectiveness of campaigns Allows for better budgeting and financial planning  Helps determine LTV of customers—allocate those resources accordingly  Helps Identify areas of improvement—prevent high CAC to wrong target customer In conclusion  We would be remiss if we didn't highlight a real brand who has put these solutions into practice and at scale—Geologie. Geologie's implementation of Littledata has yielded impressive results for their subscription business. Over the past three years, they have experienced continuous growth of over 150% without any additional expenses on customer acquisition. Moreover, their data-driven approach has led to a remarkable improvement in retention rates, increasing by 25% year-over-year. Clearly, Littledata has been instrumental in driving Geologie's revenue and LTV to new heights. Swanky reminded us that most of the data is right in front of us and while we can take action now it's important to view how CAC is changing both on the regular and over the course of time. Knowing what channels are driving high LTV customers isn’t a cure all but it will give you the insights you need to target, build, and manage effective campaigns. For many—this is one of many data problems blocked by lack of an inhouse data team—fortunately agencies like Swanky have the experience to partner with your brand. We at Littledata couldn’t ask for a better crew — they put into action the accurate data and tracking we provide for merchants of all sizes across the globe.   For more information about Swanky you can visit their website. If you have any questions on tracking, attribution, or otherwise please reach out to Littledata for a free data chat. In the meantime, stay curious and be inspired by data. It is one of the best ways to understand your customers.