Ecommerce Analytics Built Around the Questions That Drive Decisions.

Ecommerce analytics measures the metrics that drive ecommerce decisions — lifetime value, cohorts, margin, retention and unit economics — rather than just traffic metrics like sessions and pageviews. Built right, it's organised around the questions ecommerce actually runs on, so it answers what your decisions depend on and measures the business itself, not just activity on the site.

Because they describe activity, not the business. Traffic metrics don't answer whether customers are worth more than they cost, whether cohorts are improving, whether growth is profitable, or whether retention is building a base. A business can have great traffic and failing economics — and traffic analytics would never show it, because it measures the wrong things for ecommerce decisions.

Lifetime value (what customers are worth over time), cohort behaviour (how customer groups perform and improve), margin and unit economics (whether growth is profitable), and retention (whether customers come back, which drives ecommerce profitability). These are the metrics ecommerce decisions depend on — they reveal whether the business model works, which traffic numbers can't show.

Because it tells you what a customer is actually worth over time, which determines whether your acquisition is profitable and your model works. An ecommerce business can grow revenue while losing money if customers cost more to acquire than they're worth — and only LTV reveals that. It's one of the core metrics ecommerce runs on, which is why we build analytics around it rather than around traffic.

Cohort analysis groups customers (often by when they were acquired) and tracks how each group behaves over time — their retention, repeat purchase, value. It reveals whether the business is improving (newer cohorts performing better) or declining, and patterns traffic metrics hide. It's a core ecommerce analytics lens because it shows how the customer base is actually developing, which drives strategic decisions.

Ecommerce analytics applies analytics specifically to the ecommerce business, organised around the metrics ecommerce runs on — LTV, cohorts, margin, retention. General data analytics is broader. The principle is shared — answer the questions that drive decisions, not report vanity metrics — but ecommerce analytics is built around the specific decision-driving metrics of an ecommerce business, which is what makes it relevant.

Retention is one of the core metrics ecommerce analytics measures, since repeat purchase drives ecommerce profitability; CRO improves conversion, which the analytics measures the impact of. Ecommerce analytics provides the insight — what's working, where the economics are strong or leaking — that informs retention strategy and CRO. They work together: analytics reveals, retention and CRO act on what it reveals.