Magento Analytics: What’s in Store for Merchants

As an ecommerce industry professional, you’ve probably heard that Magento acquired RJMetrics last month. Based in Philadelphia, RJMetrics provides big data analytics to small and midsize businesses, and will now be called Magento Analytics. Magento said in a statement that the “advanced, cloud-based analytics solution will integrate with the Magento platform to help merchants better understand their customers, sell smarter, and increase ROI.” With an endorsement like that, we just had to learn more, so we sat down with Robert Moore, co-founder and CEO of RJMetrics and the new head of Magento Analytics. Read on for the scoop.

Blue Acorn iCi: What does Magento Analytics offer merchants?

Robert Moore: Magento Analytics is a full-stack business intelligence solution, meaning it aggregates data from multiple sources, warehouses that data in the cloud, and provides an intuitive front-end that merchants can use to discover new insights. Unlike other business intelligence tools, Magento Analytics was built from the ground-up with merchants in mind, providing analytics right out of the box that represent the best practices in the industry. By combining data from dozens of sources like Google Analytics, Magento, Zendesk, and Facebook ads, Magento Analytics creates a single source of the truth around who your most valuable customers are and how to get more like them.

Blue Acorn iCi: Prior to the acquisition, what kind of analytics did Magento offer out of the box?

RM: Magento offers a range of ecommerce analytics out-of-the-box that provide insight into sales, customers, product assortment, and marketing activities. For example, sales reports provide data on revenue, orders, shipping fees, taxes and refunds. Customer reports show revenue and order counts for customer segments, while product reports indicate which products have the most views, are best sellers, or have low inventory counts. Magento also provides marketing metrics around search terms used, private sales, and abandoned carts.

Blue Acorn iCi: Are there available extensions that do the same thing as Magento Analytics?

RM: While there are many extensions in the marketplace that offer reporting analytics, none of them provide the depth of capability combined with an intuitive interface that Magento Analytics offers. Additionally, Magento Analytics allows for you to incorporate other data sources beyond simply Magento, which many extensions don’t allow for.

Blue Acorn iCi: Does Magento Analytics replace the need for Google Analytics or other tools?

RM: Magento Analytics works right alongside Google Analytics and other web analytics tools. What Google Analytics does for page views, Magento Analytics does for people. The platform tracks customer behaviors via data in the Magento backend database and combines that data with insights from web analytics tools like Google Analytics so you can get a comprehensive view of the full customer lifecycle.

Blue Acorn iCi: Magento Analytics is for both B2B and B2C. How will it help each group specifically?

RM: B2C companies benefit from Magento Analytics by gaining a deeper understanding of who their most valuable customers are, where they came from, and how to get more like them. They can also use the platform to better understand the impact of things like marketing campaigns, merchandising decisions, promotions, and customer support on customer lifetime value. In the B2B use case, these analyses become even more important as high repeat purchase rates and key accounts are front and center. Our B2B customers can closely monitor customer cohorts and repeat purchase rates to identify opportunities to increase growth and acquire more high-value customers.

Blue Acorn iCi: How will Magento’s new analytics tool drive success for its current and future customers?

RM: Having better visibility into the data being generated by the commerce platform combined with visibility into other data sources will provide merchants with more effective and efficient means to execute on data-driven decisions. Adding this capability to a client’s toolset will allow them to make more fact-based decisions that enable the creation of programs and strategies that will positively impact sales, customer experience, and overall performance.

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RM: Magento Analytics is one of the few tools that is both merchant-focused and provides the ability to combine data from multiple sources. This means we are experts in the industry without sacrificing the ability to be comprehensive in the analytics we provide. One of the most powerful examples of this is Marketing ROI Analysis. Such an analysis can require cost data from multiple advertising networks, conversion data from a web analytics platform, margin data from an ERP system, and customer spending data from a commerce platform like Magento. Magento Analytics connects to all these data sources, allowing merchants to compare the lifetime value of their acquired customers to their true costs of acquisition by channel. These actionable insights have a powerful impact on customer acquisition strategy and spend.

Blue Acorn iCi: What kind of skills do you need to have to use Magento Analytics?

RM: Most Magento Analytics users are not engineers or data scientists. Our most common users are marketers, merchandisers, product managers, and executives. The platform’s visual report builder interface has been built with these personas in mind, meaning that users can get value from the platform regardless of their depth of technical skills. That said, more advanced users can take advantage of features like our SQL report builder to generate code-level reports.

Blue Acorn iCi: What capabilities does Magento Analytics offer that is differentiated and added in value from what Magento’s competitors offer?

RM: Merchants using Magento Analytics gain access to a sophisticated business intelligence tool designed to aggregate data from sources beyond the core ecommerce platform for deeper insights and a single source of truth. From this richer data set, Magento Analytics provides unique reporting that can power immediate business growth such as customer lifetime value, cohort, repeat purchases probability, and customer loyalty analysis.

Blue Acorn iCi: We design, develop and optimize e-commerce sites. What does Magento Analytics bring to us that can differentiate our optimization practice? Can it feed into or combine with data from testing platforms like Optimizely, Monetate, and Qubit?

RM: Magento Analytics allows our customers to both import and export data via our APIs, and customers have used this functionality to build integrations with testing and personalization platforms. The most common use case is creating custom populations based on the comprehensive data in Magento Analytics and then pushing those to the other tools using our APIs.

RM: We’ve created a wealth of benchmark reports, whitepapers, and other resources for merchants. These are available at http://www.rjmetrics.com/resources

Image via newsworks.org

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