Countly for eCommerce: Key Plugins, KPIs, and Metrics

This article highlights the Countly plugins, key analytics, and KPIs that are important specifically to the eCommerce industry. It aims to showcase how you can get started with the plugins and features most crucial to achieving specific revenue, retention, and marketing goals in eCommerce, and start a successful journey with Countly. The article presumes you are slightly familiar with the Countly UI and with the terms like Events, Funnels, Cohorts, etc.

Setting up Custom User Properties

Custom User Property is any kind of information that helps you to tag, group, and sort your users/devices using your application. More information about a User Profile can be found here. Since a User Property is associated with anything Countly tracks about the user (a Session, an Event, a Feedback given, or a Crash experienced), you may use it to create accurate micro-segmented analytics. It will be available for you while drilling the data, defining your dynamic user groups, targeting the recipients of your push notifications, etc.

The Custom User Property is a key-value pair containing either string, numerical value, or a list of values. The Countly SDKs have dedicated methods to collect and update this information. Here is an example for the iOS SDK:

Countly.user.custom = @{@"membership":@"prime",@"tags":@"girls"};

Once you integrate the Custom Property tracking into your SDK you will find it in the detail of a particular User Profile.

Setting up Events

Events allow you to track user behavior in the app. It might be any action performed by the user -  a button clicked, form filled in, or any other user interaction. By using Event Segmentation, you may track any kind of key-value pair information associated with the occurrence of the event. That helps you to micro-segment the user behavior, e.g. seeing what items are added to the cart most often, what is the most common error message user gets while checking out, or which subcategories are viewed the most.

There are three dedicated properties associated with an Event. Those are:

• Count - number of occurrences of an event (mandatory)
• Sum - any numerical value (optional)
• Dur - duration of the event in seconds (optional)

All the other information about an Event is stored as event segments.

Recording Events starts with including the following piece of code to the SDK, which sends the information to the Countly server once a user performs the event (an example for iOS):

NSDictionary* dict = @{@"Item":@"sofa", @"Message":@"'Choose the color of the item'"};
[Countly.sharedInstance recordEvent:@"Add to cart" segmentation:dict count:1 sum:120];

'Add to cart' Event

Tracking the 'Add to Cart' Event together with the properties and segmentation allows us to get the following insights:

• What is the conversion rate between adding an item to the cart and purchasing it?
• What is the average time for the app to add an item to the cart? How does it differentiate between various app versions, platforms etc.?
• What is the conversion rate for a particular category of products?
• How many times in the last month was a particular item added to the cart?
• How often do users forget to choose the color/size of the item?

The following screenshot shows the immediate information you may see on the Dashboard after you start tracking the Event. You may see how many times a particular item was added to the cart and the potential revenue coming from that particular item.

Note: Be careful about the number of Events and Segments you define - it will affect the server performance and the way you can navigate through your data. The recommended threshold for the number of Events is 500, for the number of Segments (for each Event) is 100, and the maximum number of unique values in each Segment is 1000.

Creating Cohorts

Custom User Properties, together with the Events and their Segmentation, give you the idea of what type of user you are tracking and how he/she behaves in the application. These will help you define specific user groups and analyze them. Creating user groups - Cohorts - will help you understand shared characteristics between certain users as well as how the specific user group is evolving through time. You can also target the Cohort with a customized Push Notification or tailor the application appearance/functionality for that Cohort using the Remote Config plugin (e.g. redirecting users with a prime account to the call centre while users with the basic account are redirected to the Contact Form).

Creating a Cohort: Users who recently bought shoes

Cohorts creation is done via the Countly Dashboard where you define the Properties that characterize your group. To do that you may use all the User Properties, Events and their Segmentation, Views visited, Crashes experienced, etc.

The screenshot displays the definition of a Cohort of users from the United Kingdom or Germany who successfully purchased shoes in the last 30 days. Defining a Cohort like this will immediately give us insights like:

• How does promoting shoes affect people's purchases over time?
• From which age group are the people who are buying the most/least shoes in UK/DE?
• What is the gender distribution of users who recently bought shoes?

Creating Funnels

Funnels allow you to track the user journey throughout the application by creating steps that a user would naturally take to complete an identified journey. The step of a Funnel might be anything, such as a specific Event, View, experienced Crash, Feedback given, or an actioned Push Notification. All of those are there for you to define your own sequence, to analyze how the users are going through the particular steps and what might be the reason for them to not complete the whole journey.

Funnels are created directly from the Countly Dashboard by defining the particular sequence of steps. The screenshot below shows how to define a Funnel that starts with a user clicking on the promotion of shoes up to purchasing them.

Funnel name

Promotion conversion funnel - shoes

Funnel steps

• User clicks on a promotion banner with shoes or views the product page with shoes
• User adds shoes to the cart
• User checks out
• User successfully completes a purchase

Insights

• How long on average does it take for users to successfully complete the purchase of shoes?
• At which step of the process do users usually drop off OR Which step of the process results in users not successfully finishing the purchase?
• What is the conversion rate for shoes?

Custom Dashboards

Custom Dashboards help you to stay on top of the metrics that are relevant for you or your team, and to combine the tracked data from all of your applications and visualize them together. By using multiple widgets, you might for example instantly see retention for a specific feature usage, which pages are visited the most and which have the highest bounce rate, or the average number of unsuccessful logins into the application. 

The following list of screenshots presents some examples of visualizing your data thanks to the variety of widgets Countly permits to use.

1. Creating and saving BY drill queries to the Report Manager allows you to leverage Events and their Segmentations. Thus, you are able to see which keywords were searched for the most over a chosen period of time, which categories were visited the most, or which products were added to the cart most often. 

2. Combining multiple widgets for logically connected metrics gives you some powerful insights into your purchase process. You may see how many times users added an item to a cart (420 times), what was the overall value of the goods they added to the cart (521$), what was the actual profit from completed purchases (460$), and how the money is spent for completed purchases evolving over time. 

3. Visualizing funnels may help you to evaluate a variety of conversions. It might be a general checkout conversion - such as 'How many users complete the purchase after proceeding to checkout?' - or conversion for a specific product or a specific category. Creating separate conversion funnels for each category of your products might help you to analyze which category performs the best in terms of conversion.

The above details will help you get started with Countly to achieve the goals that are pivotal to your business. For further details on any of these plugins and other features that will help you optimize your users' journey, please click here.