📈 Why Aiden has its own analytics suite

E-commerce is a complex game. Without the right performance data, it's like playing with a blindfold on. Which makes winning rather difficult. This is especially true when you try out new things, such as starting with guided selling. You're taking a risk, so it's all the more important to know what it leads to. That's what you need data - or rather: insights - for.

In May of 2023, we launched our own Impact Dashboard in Aiden. Why? To understand this, we first need to look at the questions that many of our customers face. Next, we look back at nearly a year of data and insights — and the ways they've helped “our” online stores better play the e-commerce game.

You're getting started with guided selling. What do you want to know?

As a new adopter, there's a number of basic statistics that are of interest to you:

• How often are my product finders used?
• How many users actually complete the product finder?
• How many people who receive an advice click through on one of the recommended products?

Essential and interesting, of course. But once you get the hang of it, your need for information quickly becomes more detailed:

• What are the most common answers?
• Where in the product finder do customers drop out?
• How do guided selling users convert?

These are powerful insights that help you improve a product finder, understand customer needs and provide a first understanding of the impact of guided selling.

But even then, we aren't there yet. A sharp, data-driven online store needs more.

The insight ”someone who uses a product finder converts 40% better” is nice, but pretty generic. To illustrate: If the increase in conversion of an e-bike product finder is due to the purchase of tyres, the impact is much smaller than the conversion rate suggests.

For real insight, the switch must be made from segment (“guided selling users”) to advice: What do users do with the actual advice?

• Do customers buy the recommended product? Or a variant of it?
• Or are they stubborn and disregard the advice?
• How many customers got no results at all? And for which combinations of answers?
• What are the most recommended and most clicked products?

As an e-commerce site, you want to be able to answer these kinds of questions for a real insight into the impact of your guided sellling apps. So: how are we going to do this?

Connect to Google Analytics

For most online stores, Google Analytics (GA4) is the standard for measuring their e-commerce performance. This is also the case for our customers. That's why Aiden has been offering a Google Analytics integrationfor years. However, we soon encountered a number of major limitations in answering the above questions.

In GA4, you can measure conversions, segment target groups and, of course, track and optimize the performance of your ad spend. Useful, especially for comparing the “guided selling users” segment with other website visitors.

But do you want more? Do you want to understand what receiving an advice really implies? Then Google Analytics is simply too slow and opaque. It also requires quite a bit of technical knowledge to set up reports - which are then still difficult for all stakeholders to read - and is slow. In addition, GA makes use of sampling, which leads to distorted results - especially with specific segments and/or time periods (which happen to be common conditions for guided selling).

Oh, and did we mention it's slow?

So we quickly concluded that Google Analytics does not meet the needs and necessary insights for our customers. It is complex, time-consuming and, for a store, does not allow you to answer crucial questions about the impact of guided selling.

The Impact Dashboard in Aiden

Aiden ❤️ guided selling. It is our passion and the only thing we do. For years now. This focus creates the conditions for developing features that really help our customers move forward. And, in this case - when it comes to analytics - there was now a clear reason to create something that does provide the insights that 'our' stores need.

So our starting point for the new Impact Dashboard was: not complex, time-consuming and incomplete, but easy, fast and complete.

Easy

You can set up your Impact Dashboard in 2 steps. Step 1 is to place the Aiden Script, a step you need anyway to show the product finders in yoru store. Step 2 is to place the Impact Script on the order confirmation page (documentation).

Both are a one-off and small-scale integration that allows Aiden to gather all the necessary information.

Complete and accurate

Knowing that a product finder is being used is nice, but also completely inadequate. You want to know how, where and which apps contribute to your business goals.

In Aiden, you can see at a glance the revenue for which a product finder is responsible. No inflated figures to 'claim' as much turnover as possible, but data that provides an accurate picture of the impact. We do this, for example, by checking whether the products purchased are also the recommended products, or a variant thereof. Or did customers deviate from the advice?

In addition to detailed insights for each product finder, Aiden also provides a comprehensive overview of all apps taken together. Of course, you can always select all specific time periods and filter for specific product finders (e.g. only the apps within Home, or from the German webshop). Also, extremely importantly, Aiden is deduplicating the impact here. In other words, if a customer uses two apps and buys one €50 product, you want to prevent both product finders from attributing that €50.

Online stores also rely on Aiden for a complete and accurate picture for additional insights, such as answer statistics, question drop-off, most recommended products and most clicked products.

Fast

The data that Aiden collects is available in our dashboard 24/7/365. The real speed you achieve due to the fact that Aiden provides all the insights you need. So you don't have to invest an endless amount of time in custom reporting, which subsequently does not fully meet your needs for information.

Every Monday morning, you start the week with our weekly report where we show you and all stakeholders the guided selling performance of the past week. Of course, this contains stats on usage and revenue, but also the most recommended products and possible empty advices. You can immediately see where opportunities lie and where action is needed.

The most important benefits of the Impact Dashboard at a glance:

• You can see whether customers actually buy the recommended products. Google lumps up all purchases and makes no distinction.
• You can see how much time there is between getting advice and making a purchase. This tells you a lot about the type of "doubters" per category and, for example, guides the timing of a follow-up email.
• You'll see the exact conversion rate from advice to purchase and how this varies between apps. Without sampling!
• You can see which products are most recommended and clicked on.
• Colleagues who are not very familiar with Google Analytics can now simply log into Aiden to see the impact of the guided selling apps.

From data to insights

Of course, if you want, you can still simply connect Aiden to Google Analytics (here you can find the tutorial). But be sure to go for both. Because with the Aiden Impact Dashboard, you get a lot of useful insights that you don't have in Google Analytics. And as an e-commerce manager, that's what you really need if you get started with guided selling.

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