Struggling to grow your eCommerce business? It’s time to dig deep into data. It’s impossible to improve your sales strategy without analyzing and measuring your site’s performance in key areas.
This involves creating realistic KPIs (key performance indicators) for your store and constantly monitoring and improving your growth strategy by rigorously evaluating and applying insights from the data you gather.
Not sure where to start? Plenty of tools are out there—some built into eCommerce platforms, others provided by third-parties such as Google Analytics—to help you gather and analyze data with ease.
But with so much information to work with, from bounce rates and A/B split-test results to social media stats, which eCommerce metrics are worth paying the most attention to in order to better predict your customer behavior and drive the growth of your business?
The most important KPIs for any eCommerce business are:
- Discovery: analysis of impressions
- Consideration: analysis of traffic and how visitors interact with your site
- Revenue: analysis of repeat customers, customer lifetime value and purchase frequency
- Advocacy: analysis of referral statistics
We compiled 10 key eCommerce metrics that every online seller should prioritize to measure performance and grow sales.
What are the essential eCommerce metrics to analyze?
#1. Visits
Look at all new and returning visitors to your site and where that traffic is coming from. This will provide a solid baseline metric for your visits. Where does the traffic on your site originate? Is it direct traffic, from a search engine, or is another website sending customers your way? It’s important to track email and affiliate traffic, too. Knowing where your visitors come from is crucial for segmentation.
#2. Page views
Page views allow you to sum up how many times someone has visited a specific page, meaning you can tell the popularity of different parts of your eCommerce site and optimize them accordingly.
#3. Keywords
Use keywords to evaluate how well your SEO efforts are working. See which ones are used frequently and optimize your content based on that information.
#4. Feedback and reviews
Taking note of the feedback and reviews you receive from customers is an excellent way to improve customer service. Respond to feedback (good or bad) as soon as possible, particularly on social media. You want your customers to know that not only are you prepared to listen, but you will provide help when needed.
Studies have shown that recommendations on social media or from a friend have a significantly higher conversion rate than paid ads. Consumers purchasing decisions are influenced heavily by social media posts and by the brands they follow on social media.
#5. Bounce rate
Your bounce rate tells you what percentage of visitors look at one page on your site and leave. This is important: a high bounce rate might indicate that your product page or checkout isn’t enticing enough for potential customers to stay and complete their purchase.
#6. Mobile visits
It’s increasingly important to optimize your site for mobile: 51.3% of traffic comes via a mobile device, accounting for 36.8% of sales. It’s estimated that spending through smartphones and tablets was responsible for 34.5% of total U.S. eCommerce sales in 2017. That means you’re missing out on customers if your site is not mobile-friendly.
#7. Customer satisfaction
Customer satisfaction is central to your brand’s reputation. It is vital to obtaining and keeping loyal and satisfied customers, as these customers will ultimately drive growth by becoming brand ambassadors for your business.
Measuring the number of queries you receive, how quickly you resolved the problem and your customer’s satisfaction with the support you provided are key metrics required to build great relationships and drive growth. An eCommerce help desk that keeps track of your customer support requests is essential to effectively measuring these important metrics.
#8. Conversion rate
Your conversion rate is the number of visitors who visit your site and convert to buyers. Conversions are not limited to your website—they may be tracked from other sources including social media advertising, email campaigns, promotions and so on.
Understanding your conversion rates will show you what is working in terms of driving sales, allowing you to plan carefully for future growth.
#9. Cart abandonment rate
The average online shopping cart abandonment rate is a staggering 69.23%. It’s important to know how many people bounced from your website without following through and making a purchase. With the right tools and strategy in place, it’s possible to retarget and recapture these people.
#10. Value per visit
Tracking this data allows you to understand the value of individual visitors to your site. Value per visit can be divided by your site’s revenue or by the number of visitors over a set period. This will allow you to make more informed advertising decisions and calculate your marketing ROI.
Why eCommerce metrics are important
How are people finding your store? Are they coming to look at a specific product? How long are they staying? Why are they leaving? Measuring metrics is about figuring out what sources are driving customers to your store and how those customers are interacting with your products and pages when they get there.
It’s ultimately the goals you set for your growth strategies that will define the data you focus on analyzing.
Tracking the right eCommerce metrics will improve your business model, lead to growth and help you understand your buyers’ journey. Remember, happy customers mean more sales!
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