Modern e-commerce businesses have access to a vast ecosystem of powerful analytics tools—from Google Analytics 4, Google Ads, and Meta Ads, to data sources from platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, or PrestaShop. These are excellent resources for assessing your store’s performance.
The problem? Most online retailers stop at the basics: revenue, number of transactions, conversion rates, and campaign costs. Based on this, they calculate ROI or ROAS and often stop there. While this data is valuable, it only provides a surface-level snapshot.
If your goal is to genuinely increase cart value and improve profitability, you need to dig deeper. Below are five high-impact areas of analytics that empower you to make decisions that drive real revenue not just look good in a report.
1. LTV vs. CAC – The Long Game
Most ad campaigns are measured by short-term returns: “Did the customer convert within 7 days?” This mindset can cost you hundreds of thousands in lost long-term value.
Not all customers pay off immediately. In many cases, your most valuable customers are repeat buyers returning weeks or even months later. That’s why it’s crucial to monitor Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) against Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) over longer periods: 30, 90, even 180 days.
Technically, you can achieve this by segmenting customers by acquisition source (campaign, channel, ad group) and tracking their behavior over time. This helps you uncover which channels bring in loyal customers - and which only generate one-off traffic.
2. Revenue vs. Margin – Welcome to ROAS 2.0
Standard ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) measures revenue generated relative to campaign cost. But is that enough? Not really - especially if you’re promoting low-margin products. You could have a great ROAS on paper while still breaking even or worse, losing money.
Enter: Profit-based ROAS. This metric uses net profit (revenue minus cost of goods or acquisition) instead of just revenue.
In practice, this means pulling margin data from your ERP or sales platform and integrating it with campaign performance data (e.g., from Google Ads). This lets you identify which campaigns are truly profitable, not just visually appealing.
3. Products That Attract vs. Products That Convert
Not every product that attracts users to your site is a strong seller. Often, a high-click-rate lead product drives traffic, but actual conversions happen elsewhere.
That’s why it’s critical to analyze:
- Which products/categories generate traffic,
- How they convert,
- What their average order value (AOV) is,
- What ROI they deliver.
These insights allow you to adjust your promotional strategy—investing in products that not only grab attention but actually generate revenue.
Additionally, by tracking promotion performance, you can assess whether discounts truly boost sales—or just hurt your margins and teach customers to wait for the next sale.
4. Upselling, Cross-Selling & Path-to-Purchase Analysis
Raising AOV often comes down to smart upselling (guiding toward higher-value products) and cross-selling (offering complementary items). But how do you know if it’s working?
You can measure upsell/cross-sell effectiveness by analyzing purchase sequences: what users added to their carts initially versus what they ended up buying. Tracking product combinations helps identify which items are commonly bought together—so you can recommend them in-store or in ads.
You can also segment users by their initial cart value and observe which groups respond best to tailored suggestions. These insights lead directly to AOV growth.
5. Abandoned Carts – Understand Before You Recover
Not every abandoned cart is a lost opportunity - but every one of them holds a clue. By analyzing cart abandonment data, you can learn:
- Which products are most often left behind,
- The average value of abandoned carts,
- Whether users were close to a free shipping threshold,
- If promo items were in the cart.
Armed with this data, you can refine your cart recovery strategy - e.g., dynamically recommending products to push carts over the free shipping threshold, or offering discounts only for carts above a certain value.
How to Put This into Practice
To reliably measure these metrics, invest in integrating your data into a central data warehouse—such as Google BigQuery. This becomes your single source of truth, aggregating data from:
- GA4 (user behavior),
- Advertising platforms (Google Ads, Meta, etc.),
- Internal systems (e.g., margin, pricing, inventory levels).
From there, you can build transformations and reports in BI tools (e.g., Looker Studio, Power BI) to generate a 360-degree view of what’s truly driving business outcomes.
Summary
Want to increase your average cart value? Stop relying on gut instinct—start analyzing data intelligently. This isn’t about another pop-up promo. It’s about strategic control of your offer, your campaigns, and your customer experience.
If you’d like to understand how your data can be turned into a growth engine for your company, get in touch with us.
At Alterdata, we connect data, AI, and real business needs - to deliver measurable results.
