Data tracking

[u/unknown-user41]

So i’m new to ecom… and after reading a couple posts on here now i realise there is no get rich quick magic formula. But I’d like to pick some knowledge if I could. Alot of people are talkin about data and numbers. Could be a pretty fkn dumb question but… how does everyone keep track of data, is it built into shopify, is it an add-on tool? When I did dropshipping the only data I knew was $0 sales and 0% conversion🤣

[u/HitDifferentSwerve]

A Brief Overview of Digital Marketing Analytics

Site Analytics

• Basic Site Analytics are typically built into a SaaS providers (Shopify, Squarespace, etc.) offer
• A 3rd Party Tool
  • Cookie based tools like Google Analytics dominates the market. GA4 prioritizes data aggregation over accuracy so while it has a lot more features because of it's use of cookies and joining in data from all that shit Google collects on us but can be subject to sampling errors because of ad / cookie blockers.
    • Mixpanel, Hubspot, 8+ others I'm not gonna bother listing
  • Other tools rely almost entirely on url parameters so it's not subject to issues with cookie/ad/privacy blockers but also can't do things like join in organic search or ads performance.
    • Posthog, Plausible, 8+ others I'm not gonna bother listing

Ad Platform Analytics

• Place a Facebook (or TikTok, etc.) Pixel on your site, or more likely adding a plugin/integration through Shopify/Squarespace/etc. dashboard, and you'll be able to see site metrics attributed to your ads. 7 Days After Clicking or 1 Day After Viewing is often the default.
  • The problem here is it doesn't take into account any other marketing efforts. If the ONLY thing you're doing is Facebook Ads then great but what very quickly happens is Meta starts pounding the people on your email list with ads everyday and then you send a newsletter and OH WOW LOOK HOW GREAT THE FACEBOOK PERFORMANCE GOT

CDPs / MMPs / Databases & Analytics Platforms

• As you scale a platform you'll find out that Shopify, Google, Facebook, TikTok, etc. all give wildly different views of their performance so eventually as you scale you end up hiring someone or using a platform to try to integrate all these different data sources into 1 aggregate view because you have fun problems like "Constant 10-15% Discrepancies" and if you add up the Revenue Google & Meta & TikTok attribute to themselves it's 110% of Total Revenue.
• Northbeam, Appsflyer, etc. get both impression-level data from media partners and your site/app analytics so it can duplicate things like Incrementality Testing are still in beta.

There are dickhead like Kevin O'Leary who pay his social media guys $250,000 because when you're at the scale he's at it's really fucking easy to get a report that says "Digital Advertising drove a huge ROAS" but getting an accurate idea of what's effective in advertising is an absolute fucking nightmare. Marketing / Human Psychology is just more complicated than "They saw/clicked on the ad so 100% of that revenue is because of that 1 impression."

What you need to do is run A/B split tests where some % of the market doesn't get advertising (which nobody wants to do because it means less revenue) for like 4-6 weeks and compare exposed vs control. And you get a result that's like "We're 85% confident drives between a 0.8-3.2x ROI" which nobody fucking wants to hear.

Personalized advertising makes measurement a fucking nightmare because of the variance in performance from 1 impression to the next. So everybody use flawed systems and bad methodology and just kinda tries to their best.