Ecommerce Web Analytics: Understanding Website Behaviour and Performance

Your website is where ecommerce decisions happen: product discovery, trust-building, and checkout. Ecommerce web analytics focuses on how people behave on your site—and which behaviours lead to purchases (or drop-offs).

What is ecommerce web analytics?

Ecommerce web analytics is the measurement and analysis of on-site behaviour: where visitors come from, what pages they view, what actions they take (add to cart, begin checkout, purchase), and where they abandon. It’s “web behaviour” data used to improve sales outcomes.

Essential web analytics metrics for online stores

Good web analytics covers three areas: traffic, engagement, and funnel steps.

Traffic metrics

Track sessions/users, traffic sources, and new vs returning visitors to understand both volume and quality. Traffic source mix matters because different channels often behave differently (higher bounce, lower AOV, different device mix).

Engagement metrics (bounce rate, engagement rate, time)

In GA4, bounce rate is the opposite of engagement rate and represents the percentage of sessions that were not engaged. Use this carefully: a high bounce rate on a blog post might be fine, but a high bounce rate on a paid landing page is often a warning sign.

Conversion funnel metrics

Track product page views, add-to-cart rate, checkout initiation, and purchase completion. GA4’s ecommerce measurement framework is based on sending events like add_to_cart, which populate ecommerce reporting. This event-based structure makes funnel tracking possible—if implementation is consistent.

User behaviour analysis (how to see friction, not just numbers)

Numbers tell you what happened. Behaviour tools help you see why.

Heat maps and click tracking

Heatmaps show where users click, move, and scroll. They are useful for identifying “dead zones” on a product page (for example, people don’t scroll to the size guide) and for spotting confusing elements (people rage-clicking a non-clickable area).

Session recordings

Session recordings replay individual user journeys. They can be powerful for finding UX issues like form errors or confusing shipping steps. Tools in this space often highlight privacy protections—for example, session recording products may anonymise personal data by default and offer controls to suppress sensitive elements.

User flow analysis

User flow shows the paths people take through your site (and where they get stuck). GA4’s path exploration illustrates event streams and the screens/pages users view, which is particularly helpful for diagnosing unexpected navigation loops or drop-offs after specific events.

Mobile vs desktop analytics

Mobile performance often differs from desktop. Small friction—slow pages, awkward form fields, payment issues—shows up as lower conversion rates and higher abandonment. Research on mobile site speed found that small speed improvements can influence conversion and funnel progression, so device-based analysis is not optional.

Page performance analysis (landing pages, product pages, checkout)

Analyse which landing pages generate both traffic and revenue, and which pages have the highest exits. Site speed is especially important: Google’s PageSpeed Insights describes itself as reporting on user experience for mobile/desktop and offering suggestions to improve performance, which is a practical tool for turning “slow page” complaints into a fix list.

If you care about SEO as well as conversions, Core Web Vitals are a set of real-world user experience metrics (loading, interactivity, visual stability) that Google recommends site owners improve for search success and good user experience, and they’re part of page experience considerations.

Using web analytics to improve conversions

A practical flow is: find a funnel step with a big drop-off → review behaviour (heatmaps/recordings) → identify a hypothesis → run an A/B test or fix → measure impact. Speed fixes often pay back: the “Milliseconds make Millions” research highlights how small speed changes can affect conversion and engagement metrics, which is why performance work is a revenue lever—not just a technical task.

Conclusion

Ecommerce web analytics shows you what customers do on your site—and what stops them from buying. When you combine funnel metrics with behaviour insights (heatmaps, recordings, user flow), you get a practical roadmap for conversion lifts that don’t rely on spending more on ads.