Looking at a dashboard filled with metrics can get overwhelming, especially for new retailers. What does everything mean? How do you know what the data is telling you? When it comes to data analysis, not everything is intuitive.

Numbers around sales, costs and other typical business metrics represent one data set. But there’s a whole new world of insights contained within your online store. In most cases, these insights will come from Google Analytics. Some merchants may put other data collection tools in place. However you’re collecting practical user experience data, it plays a huge role in the success of your store.

What can the numbers tell you? Check out four questions user experience data can answer about your website.

How much time shoppers spend on your website has a direct impact on sales. Analyzing the time spent is only the tip of the iceberg. If shoppers are leaving before purchasing, at what point in the sales funnel are they deciding to abandon ship? A robust analytics platform will help you identify this.

When you’ve collected the relevant metrics, you can take measures to keep customers on your site longer. For instance, if you notice that customers go idle while on your site, you can implement a pop-up ad or other upselling feature to draw them back into the sales process.

Front-page ads call shoppers to action from the moment they hit the site. When placed correctly, they can become a major part of converting more sales. Analyzing the bounce rate is another way to measure the effectiveness of your homepage. When customers arrive, do they see something enticing? Or do they leave shortly after arriving?

Find out which ads are performing the best and follow that recipe for success. It could help boost sales in a big way.

For young stores, trial and error is a crucial part of getting off the ground. Stores with a wide berth may feature a large array of categories. Categories are paths that can give you insight into how customers find the products they’re looking for.

The more you know about your most popular categories, the more you can optimize them to make it even simpler for shoppers to find them. With a clarified navigation to popular items, you can sell more products.

Checkout: the last bastion. Your shopper has almost reached the goal. But they still have an opportunity to opt out…and they often do. Shopping cart abandonment is an epidemic that you can tackle head-on by measuring where shoppers get caught up.

For instance, are you asking shoppers for too much information? Are there too many pages? How do you illuminate the light at the end of the tunnel? Consider this data carefully to ensure you lose fewer customers in the process.