Today, virtually anything you want to purchase is available online.. For ecommerce sites, this means the potential to significantly grow the business through expanding into new markets, reaching the target audience, and using data to drive more effective campaigns that boost conversions.
Knowing what to track to measure forward movement for an online business is critical. A common mistake that ecommerce businesses make is focusing on only tracking conversion rates, traffic, and sales. While this provides general insight into growth, other ecommerce key performance indicators (KPIs) can be more informative and critical to understanding how to sustain growth and continue to increase profits and sales.
Getting Started
One of the most effective ways to start tracking the right ecommerce key performance indicators for your business is to work with a digital marketing agency specializing in marketing analytics.
These companies work closely with the business to determine the most effective ecommerce key performance indicators to track based on the specifics of the business.
In addition to the basics of conversion rates, sales, profit, and traffic, other KPIs that may be just as important include:
• Customer retention – do customers remain loyal to the brand and return to make future purchases, or are most customers only purchasing once from the site?
• Cart abandonment – how many customers place items in the cart and then leave the site without making a purchase?
• Lifetime value – over the customer’s lifetime with making purchases, what is their total purchase value with the ecommerce site?
• Average order value – what is the average amount the customer spends per purchase on the site?
• Customer satisfaction – how do customers rate or rank the ecommerce site experience?
Each of these KPIs has a direct relationship to profit, increased sales, and retaining loyal customers.
