272: Judah Phillips author of bestseller “eCommerce Analytics”

Judah Phillips is a global leader in the field of analytics and data science, and the author of Amazon bestseller “eCommerce Analytics: Analyze and Improve the Impact of Your Digital Strategy”. We talk LTV, data visualisation and making your business more data focused. Some awesome tips in here too.

Getting Started

Judah grew up exposed to the retail industry in the days before the internet. Since the internet came along, he’s been long fascinated by how eCommerce works and has helped a lot of companies crunch their numbers and optimize their outcomes using all things analytics

Being able to tie behavior and experiences back to revenue is key for businesses to get right if they want to optimize growth. Analytics is one of the surefire ways to do that well.

With advanced degrees in business and finance, Judah jokes that he is a capitalist through and through. Ultimately, tying experience to revenue successfully is what pays the bills. 

Key Concepts in Analytics

Judah’s book,  eCommerce Analytics: Analyze and Improve the Impact of Your Digital Strategy. is basically a student’s guide to understanding eCommerce. Unfortunately, he says, there was a companion version that was never published that was essentially a teachers edition for the book.

Even without the “teacher’s version”, it’s a great resource for understanding the importance of different key analytics. Even though the internet and entire eCommerce sector of the economy is always changing, Judah says that the concepts about analytics remain the same. 

Whether you are a data junkie or hate looking at your analytics Judah says some of the key elements you need to understand include the following:

Revenue based metrics

• Revenue per customer
• Customer profitability
• Customer lifetime value

Conversions

• Units per transactions
• Average order value

Channel Effectiveness

Customer Lifetime Value

One of the trickiest analytics to get right, customer lifetime value may just be one of the most important analytics for eCommerce businesses. Judah says that this number is not the total profitability of a customer at any one time, nor is it the total amount a customer has spent.

Rather, it has a predictive element to it and is meant to provide insight into retention and loyalty. To understand this number,  businesses must first understand their own business cycle. It’s a crucial component to understanding how to make good assumptions about your customer value and ensure that you have the right data collections in place.

Judah says that consistency over time is also important. Often, people get overwhelmed by trying to calculate this and fall back onto easier to understand metrics. Digging in and getting it right is a jackpot for eCommerce businesses. 

Technologies

With so many great technologies out there to help sort through all the numbers, Judah leaves us with his favorites:

• Super Metrics allows you to bring your data in and out of the Google ecosystem and connect to different data sources
• Funnel.io Similar to Supermetrics but allows you to connect to even more advertising and paid media sources

What about Google Data Studio?

In 1998, Judah was working at a Software company doing ‘information retrieval” (since the term search was not yet popular). He says he still remembers the day google came on the scene and has been a longtime fan.

As far as their analytics, Judah points out that Data Studio is free—and anything that’s free is going to satisfy a lot of needs. He says that this is a great place to start, but it doesn’t have all the capabilities that some of the paid software have. 

Getting Visual

Using tools that bring data together and synthesize it into visually digestible information is amazingly helpful. Judah says that creating visualizations is a useful tool for all business owners and his favorite master of visualization is Dr. Andrew Abela of extremepresentation.com

eCommerce Book Top Tip

• The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
• The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse

eCommerce Traffic Top Tip

• Content Marketing—Search dominates. All the analytics that Judah analyzes are driven by meaningful, rich, helpful content.

Tool Top Tip

• Linkedin
• Calling people up and trying to meet with them in person

Growth Top Tip

• Get your brand right. Even if the product itself isn’t the best, brand is how people associate meaning. 

Interview Links

• Email
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Judah’s Book eCommerce Analytics

Related episodes

• “Ultimate Guide to e-Commerce Growth” author Ian Hammersley shares top KPI & optimisation tips
• Sugru’s Linda Muck on the importance of analytics and driving traffic to an online-only eCommerce business
• Takeaways from DCA – Email Marketing, Video, Direct Mail, and Customer Psychology
• Judah’s Book eCommerce Analytics

Without the sponsors the podcast wouldn’t be possible – please do check them out:

Klaviyo is the world’s leading owned marketing platform known for accelerating revenue for online businesses using the channels they own like email, web and mobile. Enabling companies to leverage these owned marketing channels, Klaviyo makes it easy to store, access, analyze and use transactional and behavioral data to power highly-targeted customer and prospect communications. And unlike other marketing platforms, Klaviyo doesn’t force companies to compromise between advanced functionality or ease of use – so companies of all sizes are able to maximize their sales quickly. That’s 38,000+ innovative companies across the world sell more with Klaviyo.

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