E-commerce monitoring is of paramount importance to understand whether the Web site is working properly, to carry out an evaluation of Web Marketing activities, and to detect the presence of navigational or technical problems.

The data that are analyzed are qualitative and quantitative and are able to rise to the role of guiding the actions that need to be implemented to make performance even better.

All this is even more important for an e-commerce, which is called upon to evaluate sales, product preferences, shopping carts, effectiveness of promotions, contact requests, from the rate of cart abandonment at checkout.

What is important to monitor in an e-commerce? Let’s look at it below.

Monitoring an e-commerce: what to see
The first thing an ecommerce must enable is advanced tracking of both transactions and sales, as well as intermediate steps, such as a shopping cart being added or removed, product clicks, how check-outs behave, and the display of promotional banners.

Also particularly useful are product reports, which help ecommerce identify the top-performing and underperforming products, and then identify appropriate marketing strategies.

Advanced tracking, then, is critical to improving overall e-commerce performance, but there are other metrics that are important, despite the fact that they do not have a close link to purchase.

For example, through the use of Google Tag Manager, it is possible to track contact form completion, emails leaving the Web site, various calls, file downloads, and newsletter sign-ups.

Very important is to analyze the purchase profile of customers, of their loyalty and spending capacity. In this way, e-commerce will be able to determine what are the best marketing strategies customized for different groups of customers.

In light of what has been said so far, we will discuss the monitoring tools of an e-commerce in the next section.

E-commerce monitoring tools
E-commerce monitoring tools include the following:

• SeoZoom: this is an Italian-language tool that indicates the positioning of an e-commerce. This allows you to analyze both your own ranking and that of your competitors.
• Google Search Console former Webmaster Tool: this is the best tool for analyzing an e-commerce site, as you can get a complete picture of its health and ranking, as well as the presence of any errors. Within search console it is possible to submit the sitemap.xml of the site, so as to get proper indexing.
• GTMetrix: is an online tool with which to monitor the speed of a Web site, as well as its weak points. The data analysis is accompanied by advice from PageSpeed and YSlow, two excellent tools that show what there is to improve.
• Google Structured Data Analysis: so many Web sites continue to snub structured data. Instead, it would be good to include checking competitor sites in the analysis. This Google monitoring tool offers a technical analysis, which allows a thorough check of the snippets that you absolutely must activate.
• SeoQuake: is an SEO analysis tool, to be added in Chrome as a plugin, which provides lots of data inherent to a site, such as those regarding external and internal links on the page, ownership data, etc. It is particularly useful when it is necessary to conduct a competitor analysis and audit and, therefore, define a strategy.
• Google page speed: in the context of positioning, it is the best tool for analyzing both the usability and speed of an e-commerce. It offers a lot of data that is accompanied by suggestions and directions for improving page performance.
• HotJar: is a very powerful tool as it offers the ability to create both a heat map and mouse movements on a page. In this way it is possible to understand whether the text, fonts, button positions and colors are suitable for the intended purpose.

Those listed are just some of the tools for monitoring an e-commerce, but they are undoubtedly the best ones to rely on.