The Key Performance Metrics and Analytics to Track for E-Commerce Success

The Key Performance Metrics and Analytics to Track for E-Commerce Success

When running an E-commerce business, tracking your performance is necessary to see how your store is running. E-commerce metrics play a significant role in this.

Several e-commerce key performance indicators (KPIs) can help you track how your e-commerce business gets a bird’s-eye view of its success. Here are the top 10 essential metrics to help you analyze your business and where you can find or build them. 

What are E-commerce Metrics and KPIs?

E-commerce metrics and KPIs are critical data and analytics that help determine overall business success. How many customers do you get? How often do customers return? Are they leaving items in their online cart?

These metrics help brands determine popular products, how often specific products are purchased, whether any flaws in the checkout process prevent new customers from converting, and so much more.

Read more: How to check your Shopify store performance?

10 Important Metrics for a Successful E-commerce Store

While there are so many E-commerce metrics that your company can track, it can rapidly become overwhelming. When there is too much data to examine effectively, it becomes white noise. However, specific metrics can be used to predict your E-commerce store’s success. We’ve selected these ten E-commerce metrics that will help you to track the effectiveness of your sales and marketing strategies.

1. Conversion Rate

Conversion rate is one of the most important e-commerce metrics

Conversion rate is one of the most important e-commerce metrics

Conversion is one of the most straightforward E-commerce metrics to track. Your conversion rate is the total number of purchases divided by the total number of site visits. So, if you have 5000 site visits and 400 buy something, your sales conversion rate is 8%.

One of the most important measures of whether your offerings appeal to your target audience is your ability to convert visitors into buyers. Conversion can also be used to track the efficacy of specific marketing initiatives, such as SEO or influencer campaigns.

Check out: How to increase conversion rates with copywriting

2. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

While attracting customers exclusively by organic means would be ideal, this isn’t the reality for most companies. As E-commerce becomes increasingly competitive, brands are being pushed to spend more on client acquisition. 

However, if the cost of attracting leads only results in a few conversions, it’s a prescription for failure. This is because acquiring a new customer can cost up to 7 times more than selling to existing customers. Your e-commerce business should have proper customer acquisition strategies.

3. Average Order Value (AOV)

The average order value on your e-commerce site relates to the average transaction. As customer loyalty grows, merchants should try to increase their AOV over time, which means increasing higher customer lifetime value. 

Average order value is a particularly advantageous E-commerce metric because it’s easy to impact without a large marketing budget. 

For example, customer loyalty programs, upselling/cross-selling, and online sales are all wonderful strategies for growing AOV. This is far more cost-effective than acquiring new customers or persuading existing customers to shop more often.

4. Social Media Engagement

Social media is an important marketing channel for direct-to-consumer firms that do not have a physical presence. As a significant source of referral website traffic, you should monitor the performance of your social media material.

Keep your social media engagement active

Keep your social media engagement active

3 metrics will provide much stronger insights about your social media channels than “likes”: Click-through rate, referrals, and social conversions.

5. Bounce Rate

Bounce rate refers to the number of people who leave your site after reading only one page. This is expressed as a percentage of the total number of visits.

While it’s preferable to keep your bounce rate as low as possible, a bounce rate less than 25% may indicate that something is wrong with your website. A bounce rate of 45.68% is considered average for E-commerce stores, as customers are likely to browse many product pages.

Check out: How to minimize the bounce rate of your website?

6. Return Rate

Many merchants would prefer to disregard the return rate. We all know that returns are a big issue in E-commerce, but ignoring them will undoubtedly make them disappear. The average return rate in E-commerce is 20%-30%, which can reach as high as 40% for product categories such as clothes. 

As a result, your company must understand why this is happening and whether it is under your control.

7. Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate

Getting consumers to add things to their cart is one thing; convincing them to purchase is a considerably more challenging issue. Just like returns, shopping cart abandonment is an unavoidable part of E-commerce.

8. Percentage of Repeat Customers vs. First-time Customers

Your new vs. existing customers proportion reflects your customer retention rate and is closely related to customer acquisition costs. The acquisition cost is substantially cheaper if returning clients are already close to your brand and offers. 

9. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Don't forget to measure customer lifetime value

Don't forget to measure customer lifetime value

Measuring the value of your clients one sale at a time is a huge mistake. A customer who spends a lot of money on one item and never returns will be worth less than one who makes multiple modest purchases over a more extended period of time. 

A high-value item that never stops with you again will be worth less than one that makes several smaller purchases over a more extended period of time. Customer lifetime value is used to track the revenue clients generate during their engagement with you.

10. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Net Promoter Scores is a vital e-commerce metric that tracks customer happiness with your brands. NPS provides a considerably less time-consuming option by simply asking consumers on a scale of 1 to 10 how likely they are to suggest you to others. 

Bonus Tips: Get a Detailed E-commerce Report with Shopify Apps

Building e-commerce stores with Shopify is one of the most popular options due to its ease of use, reasonable prices, nice customer support,... Shopify offers many apps for exporting data analytics from your e-commerce stores. 

Super Reports is one of the most valuable apps for tracking e-commerce metrics. The goal of Super Reports is to offer a hassle-free way to monitor crucial metrics and manage store performance. 

Currently, the app has over 50 must-have report templates for e-commerce, covering 500+ Shopify data fields,...ensuring you don't overlook any important insights. Furthermore, the real-time data sync enables you to customize reports with the key metrics that matter and schedule autogenerated emails of those reports to your personal inbox or to coworkers.

Final Words

Here are 10 key performance metrics and analytics to track for E-commerce success. Hope this will help you to build your own KPIs. Find more on https://2-b.io/.

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