Starting an ecommerce store can be intimidating for people who have never done it before. There are so many new terms and ideas, it can all get a bit overwhelming. And to top it all off, your financial health depends on your ability to quickly adapt to these new ideas. Coupon codes and promotions are two things that you will almost certainly encounter during your time running an ecommerce store. Both can help you increase the profitability of your site. This is why it’s important to track coupon codes and promotions.

What Are Coupon Codes for Ecommerce?

Ecommerce coupon codes are simply codes consumers can input at checkout in order to receive some sort of discount on their purchase. It’s likely you’ve used a coupon code at some point while shopping online. There are some pros and cons of using coupon codes, so it’s necessary that you use them the right way, or not at all.

As noted by Kissmetrics, a standard coupon code entry box is not necessarily beneficial to your bottom line. The first thing most people will do when they see a coupon entry box is search Google for a coupon. This is bad because it takes people away from your store, which then lowers the chance of them actually completing the transaction. If you’re going to use coupon codes, you should just give them to customers at checkout, or else not make the coupon entry area obvious. Otherwise, you are going to lose sales if people abandon your cart to look elsewhere.

Why Is Tracking Coupon Codes Valuable?

If your cloud ecommerce software allows you to customize your site’s appearance to solve the aforementioned issue with coupon codes, they can provide real value to your site. Coupon codes can encourage people to spend more money. But why should you track them? Well, you can gain valuable insights into your customers’ buying behaviors by tracking the success of your various coupon codes.

Gathering information about the way people interact with your ecommerce store will allow you to create better-targeted coupon codes, which will drive more sales. Tracking coupon codes can be especially useful when used with affiliates or social influencers. This will allow you to see exactly how successful each campaign was at driving consumers to your store.

What Are Promotions for Ecommerce? 

Ecommerce promotions are special selling events that are designed to drive additional traffic to your online store. These are extremely common around holidays such as Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day and Cyber Monday. As with physical retailers, ecommerce stores sometimes need a way to make themselves stand out from other sites. Promotions are great for this because they can create a lot of buzz for an ecommerce store.

Tracking is also important for promotional events because you need to get detailed data each time you run a promotion. Without numbers to back up your promotion, it can be difficult to tell whether or not it was a success. Obviously, the amount of money you make important value. However, there are additional key metrics, such as customer acquisition cost (CAC), which can be addressed by tracking promotions. Creating a promotion costs money. By spending money, you want to gain loyal customers. Keeping customers over a long period can lower your marketing expenses in the long run. It cost much less to keep a customer than it does to get new ones. This is why tracking the loyalty and value of customers gained through promotions is such a valuable ability.

To newcomers in the ecommerce space, tracking coupon codes and promotions might seem like an unnecessary use of time. However, it’s important that you track these things in order to keep tabs on your online store’s bottom line.