Analyze your acquisition channels

Understanding how many and where your customers are coming from is crucial for any business, but particularly those in the e-commerce sector. Amplitude helps you understand how many customers are finding your store, how effective different campaigns are at creating new revenue, and which channels drive the most engagement.

Armed with this knowledge, you can focus your efforts on optimizing ad spend, marketing efforts, and product enhancements.

You’ll find this information in the Ecommerce Report template. There’s no setup required, though you can easily customize the template itself and the individual charts included with it if you need to.

The Ecommerce Report template includes the following charts related to customer acquisition:

• How are customers finding my shop?
• How many customers have visited my shop in the last 30 days?

For a more detailed view into any of these questions, simply click the title of the chart you’re interested in.

Customize the Ecommerce Report template

You can customize this or any template by first converting it into a dashboard. In Amplitude, templates and dashboards are related but distinct concepts. A dashboard is a single, convenient view of several related charts; you’d use a dashboard to share insights with other stakeholders in your Amplitude project. A template is a re-usable version of a dashboard; you’d use it to make other, similar dashboards, which you could then customize to meet the specific needs of a different project.

To turn the template into a dashboard, follow these steps:

1. From the dropdown in the upper left, select the Amplitude project you want this dashboard to track. If you want it to track the current project, just leave it as-is.

2. Under Events, select the events you want to use for the charts in this dashboard. The E-Commerce template is set up to track events for:

   • Page View / Navigation
   • Viewing Item
   • Adding to Cart
   • Completing Purchase
   • As well as properties for Traffic Source

For example, you could select a page view / navigation event to generate an understanding of traffic as it enters your site, and general navigation throughout. Or if you’re more interested in identifying traffic sources, you could select a property of your page view / navigation event that tracks the user's source. This is often a UTM parameter like utm_source.

You don't have to supply an event or property for anything you aren't ready to track right now.

3. Click Save As Dashboard, give your new dashboard a name, and select a location to save it in. Then click Save.

Your dashboard is now ready to use.

Check out this article to learn more about dashboards, and this article to learn more about templates in Amplitude.