In the modern complex retail environment, brands often sell products across various online and offline channels, like brick-and-mortar stores, e-commerce websites, online marketplaces, and social platforms. While selling across different touchpoints allows retailers to maximize reach, it also introduces complexity when it comes to managing business analytics.
If you’re using ads, for example, you can use a tool to integrate your ads into one multichannel e-commerce platform, so you can list, advertise, and optimize millions of products across channels and teams. This makes it easier to manage your ads and consolidate key metrics from all sales channels within one centralized dashboard. A well-designed ‘single pane of glass’ provides immense value for brands operating multi-channel strategies, enabling them to better track KPIs, identify growth opportunities, and optimize decision-making across the organization.
Centralize Vital Multi-Channel Data
The first step in creating an effective centralized analytics dashboard is to identify key performance indicators that should be monitored across different channels Important omnichannel metrics include:
- Revenue growth
- Average order value
- Conversion rates
- Repeat purchase rate
- Customer acquisition cost
- Lifetime value
Leading business intelligence tools allow e-commerce brands to pull this data from all connected platforms into a single reporting suite. This provides complete visibility in one place instead of having to log into separate dashboards.
In terms of functionality, retailers should be able to slice and dice omni-channel data, filter by custom date ranges, and create comparative reports across channels or time periods. Robust analytics tools enable users to spot trends, quantify growth opportunities, and better understand funnel performance.
Customizable Visual Reports
While tables of metrics have their place, visual data presentations make information easier for stakeholders to digest – especially non-technical teams. Modern analytics solutions allow retailers to build completely customized reports with interactive charts and graphs that help highlight key takeaways and patterns.
Common visualizations like bar charts, line graphs, scatter plots, tables, and geo maps can be incorporated to showcase omni-channel analytics. For optimal usability, branded reporting templates can be saved and shared across the organizations based on use case. This simplifies presenting actionable insights to different departments in a consistent, visually appealing format.
User Access and Permissions
For large enterprises, it’s important to configure user roles and permissions that appropriately restrict access to sensitive company data. Sales VPs may need a comprehensive view while lower-level associates require reporting on just their channel.
With defined user tiers, brands can ensure teams or individuals only see the omni-channel analytics relevant to their function. Setting data access rules minimizes visibility into unnecessary metrics while still providing enough visibility required to make daily decisions.
Additionally, leveraging single sign-on integrations with existing authentication systems simplifies managing user provisioning and reduces friction for end-users accessing dashboards.
Turn Insights into Action
While consolidating disparate analytics into flexible, visual reports adds tremendous value on its own, the metrics are only useful if they empower strategic decision-making. Retail brands should consistently review omni-channel dashboards with key stakeholders and facilitate action-oriented discussions about performance.
By uncovering actionable opportunities together, brands can reallocate budgets to better-performing platforms, optimize underperforming touchpoints, adjust promotional strategies, expand channel reach, and better coordinate teams towards unified KPIs. Comparing metrics week-over-week or month-over-month also keeps leadership aligned on progress against growth goals.
The omni-channel analytics dashboard serves as the central nervous system that gives retailers cross-channel visibility to capitalize on emerging trends, while keeping focus on long-term objectives. Built correctly, it becomes an invaluable asset.
Carefully Selecting Business Intelligence Platforms
Given the immense value quality business intelligence provides multi-channel enterprises, selecting the right underlying technology is crucial. Retailers should evaluate platforms on capability to ingest data from all existing sales channels and systems. As new touchpoints get added, the analytics solution should seamlessly integrate additional feeds without major development overhead.
Leading platforms also allow non-technical users to create customized, interactive visualizations without relying on developers or consultants. This allows retailers to be self-sufficient adapting reports to evolving business needs.
Operating complex multi-channel business models introduces analytical complexity. By investing in business intelligence stacks that consolidate cross-channel data into customizable dashboards, enterprise retailers gain an informal advantage that powers more strategic decision-making.
With unified visibility, brands can better optimize resources towards growth opportunities, maximize channel efficiency, streamline operations, and provide unified visibility that keeps the entire organization progressing towards the same omni-channel KPIs. Managing analytics on a single platform paves the way for data-driven leaders to find success.
