Building trust in ecommerce analytics, with Littledata’s Edward Upton

For all the analytics tools in the modern ecommerce stack, retailers often still experience discrepancies between the analytics data, and actual revenue figures in the ecommerce platform.

Ultimately, this restricts marketing, since a lack of confidence in the data translates into greater caution when allocating budgets.

Solving this problem is Edward Upton, whose company, Littledata, helps retailers harness the first-party data at their disposal, and to ensure greater accuracy across the whole marketing arsenal. Intergrating with marketing channels such as Klaviyo, Google Analytics and Meta, as well as with commerce platforms including Shopify. 

Edward joined us on the latest episode of Martalks, where we discussed how Littledata’s Klaviyo integration can help brands not only with abandoned carts, but even abandoned browsing sessions. 

We also touched on how lost confidence in the data trickles down to the agencies that brands collaborate with, and dipped into Edward’s prior experience as a startup founder, including the importance of starting a new business with the right team. 

You can listen to the podcast below, or read on, for some of the key moments from the conversation. 

The trust problem in ecommerce analytics

DR: What’s the biggest problem that you help your clients solve, once they have Littledata live? 

EU: Most of the brands we work with come to us with this nagging suspicion that the reports they’re used to seeing in Google Analytics, or Facebook ads, or wherever, are not actually quite right. They often don’t know what the root cause is, they don’t know enough about the underlying tracking to know that it’s off. They just don’t trust it.

One of the reasons they don’t trust it is the revenue they see just doesn’t match the revenue that they know from the e-commerce platform, from their Shopify admin, that they’ve actually done that week. If you can’t make those high level metrics line up all of the underlying data, all of the more detailed reports, you start to lose confidence in them.

It’s not just about the reporting. The clients’ tactics improve because they’re getting more accurate recurring orders or information about upsells or other tactics they’re using.

Uncovering first-party data for performance marketing

DR: I’m a big fan of the entire composable commerce movement and one of the leading providers in data is Klaviyo. And Littledata does have an integration with Klaviyo, 

and one of the use cases that I saw that fascinated me is how to address abandoned carts and user ID matching using first party data.

EU: What Littledata is doing here is native identity resolution.

What that means is that you have, as a brand, lots of customers on your storefront who are interacting with sites, adding products to cart, but maybe not completing the order. And some of those customers are also people that are on your CRM. They’re on your email list. The challenge has always been, ‘how do you know that?’

Because the point at which they’re browsing and considering a purchase they’re not logged in. On an e-commerce storefront, there’s no log in. So the challenge is, how do you match profiles together and say,‘this visitor is actually Edward who is on our email list.’ So if you did want to email him, now’s your chance. That’s the problem we’re solving.

The solution, without going too deep into the tech, is basically about using identity graphs, pulling together cookie identifiers and then what’s actually happening on the Shopify cart.  We bring those elements together so that if they are someone you already know, if they have gone through some previous journey, they’ve identified themselves as a particular person on your list, then you can re-target them. What that means in practical terms is, we’re seeing a 40 to 50% uplift in the number of people that you can actually email with an abandoned cart campaign.

We’re just launching abandoned browse campaigns, which track observables, for example a consumer has viewed the product but not added it to cart. We’re seeing an even bigger uplift there.

For most brands we talk about, that is the single biggest and most successful tactic in Klaviyo. So it’s a meaningful improvement.

How data accuracy can improve collaboration between agencies and retailers

DR: You’re dealing with a broad cross section of digital marketing agencies…. What kind of partners have been best for Littledata? Both in terms of being aware of your solution and then introducing your solution or utilizing your solution to the merchants?

EU: We work a lot with agencies of all types: performance marketing agencies, CRO agencies, design and build agencies. 

The reason it works so well as a channel for us is that, first of all, we’re solving a major pain point. Most agency managers I talk to, one of their top customer gripes is ‘I don’t think these reports are quite working’. 

They don’t want to step in because ultimately that’s not the service they’re providing. But it is a blocker for their business. 

If you don’t have a baseline of how the funnel’s steps are all working then it’s very difficult to make any concrete improvements, because you don’t know what it was like before or how it’s getting better.

Martech startups: Build a team, as well as product

DR: What’s been your biggest challenge this time around as a founder?

EU: I had a previous startup in the edtech world. It was just over ten years ago, we wrapped that up. I think what I learned from that first experience was the importance of building a team. We built a product, but we never really built a team. Everything was sort of outsourced.

Obviously, a tough learning as a founder, but when I went out to actually try and sell that business, I realized actually people wanted to buy us for the talent, they didn’t really want to buy us for the customer base or the content, which was what we thought they’d value.

So I think when I started Littledata, I was very keen that we built the team first and the product second and I’m very proud of that.