Analytics dashboards are like report cards from school. They tell you what happened, but this information is often not enough to take action. For example, you can learn how much revenue a store made in a given period of time, but then what? You might want to grow the revenue, but what can you do to achieve this goal?
Dashboards that aren't actionable, do not help a store make more money.
Our analytics dashboards should provide actionable insights, rather than serving solely as report cards of past events. This approach to analytics is known as Actionable Intelligence.
According to Keith B Carter, an expert in data-driven decision making (DDDM) who advises companies on the strategic use of data to deliver results, and who has written a foundational book on digital transformation, "having end-to-end visibility of business data in an actionable way delivers dramatically improved business performance."
According to the concept of Actionable Intelligence, analytics dashboards should provide insights that enable you to take action, rather than just presenting past events. For an online store, this means using data to understand what's happening with your store, and then taking steps to improve performance.
By periodically analyzing data on customer behavior, store traffic, sales, inventory and pricing can help you identify areas for improvement and take action to optimize your store to make more money.
Store audit is the process of analyzing store data to assess the health of a retail store, whether online or offline. Traditionally, this process is done manually by store staff or a freelancer once every few months. With Konigle's store audit tool, the process of a shopify store audit can be automated for online stores and done every week or on demand. Konigle also includes built-in tools that online stores can use to fix problems flagged by store audits.
Why would a store be audited? There are several reasons why a store might undergo an audit. A properly performed store audit helps a retail business :
- Identify critical issues to fix. These are time-sensitive issues and should be identified and fixed as soon as possible as these issues may be causing a loss in revenue. One such issue is capturing buyer intent in out-of-stock products.
- Identify short-term trends to act on. Being able to identify short-term trends like a drop in conversion rate could be due to a bug on your store website, a price change, or maybe your store becoming slower due to changes you made on your store.
- Find profitable growth opportunities. Less than 20% customers on average buy again from an online store. Identifying customers who have not bought the second time and sending them a time bound discount coupon to buy again is a highly profitable growth opportunity.
Regularly auditing your Shopify store is the smartest way to make more money from your online business. Using Konigle you can automate this process for free. Konigle would automatically audit your store on a weekly basis and provide a Store Health score with Issues that you should fix to make more money.
Konigle also tells you about potential fixes against each issue, to help you fix them. Most issues can be fixed in minutes using Konigle's seller tools.
Here's an internal audit checklist for retail industry, basically a free store audit checklist in excel put together by our team that can be used by you to conduct a retail store audit. Find the checklist here : Google Sheet.
