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As an online retailer, you can easily get lost with what to track in terms of Ecommerce KPI Metrics. The value of each metric is unique and identifying the key performance indicators (KPIs) to track is crucial for an online store’s success.
Sales, traffic, and profits are all evident and important Ecommerce KPI metrics for businesses to monitor, but they are just part of various metrics you should watch.
Selecting the suitable KPI to monitor will depend on your unique business goals. While there are KPIs that will support specific goals, there are also those that’ll be irrelevant. Since KPIs should vary based on goals measured, you can consider some common indicators for eCommerce.
The following sections of this article will:
There may be various performance indicators for many goals. But often, people narrow them down to a few impactful ones known as the key performance indicators.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) determine how well a company, team, or online business owner is doing against their business goals and objectives. These metrics are the most valuable and relevant to your business.
It would also help to note that many people often use the terms KPI and Metrics interchangeably.
KPIs are metrics that gauge your business’s vital goals, objectives, and initiatives. For instance, as an online retailer, your goal might be to increase your site traffic to over 70% over the next year.
Relative to your plan, your KPI might be the daily quantity of unique site visitors or the traffic source that sends your visitors, like search engine optimization, display advertising, or paid advertising. In short, KPIs might have various metrics.
As for metrics, they measure the progress of the overall health of your business goals. Despite being loosely tied to specific targeted objectives, they’re not as crucial as KPIs and may lack the guidance on whether you’re on track. However, metrics can provide valuable business data. For instance, you might track your site visitors as a metric, but unless you tie it to your business objective, it is a metric, not a KPI.
Understanding the difference between KPI and Metrics is crucial if you wish to base your business decisions on data.
Failure to understand the two might mean you’re focusing on the wrong measurement, creating confusion around your objectives and goals, and affecting your decisions your actual data may not support.
KPIs are valuable for any business measurement. Follow this four-step approach to create a KPI:
First, it would help determine which of your business objectives you’re trying to gauge to create your KPI. With so many things to measure, you might end up overwhelmed.
Therefore, your strategy acts as the starting point for designing an appropriate KPI. For instance, one of your critical strategic objectives could be to increase the flow of the marketing pipeline in the next financial year.
You’ll have to imagine what it’s like to achieve success with your key objectives. For instance, if you aim to increase the flow of the marketing pipeline in the next financial year, it would mean increasing your contacts passing through the pipeline’s end and getting handed over to sales for this objective to succeed.
You’ll need to determine how to measure success to create a KPI. You’ll have to increase the contacts entering the pipeline and those passing through the end for your objective to succeed.
The number of new subscribers from your subscriptions can easily measure the number of contacts getting into the marketing platform.
Finally, you’ll have to create your KPIs by writing them down. One of the best ways of writing your KPIs is using the SMART approach. The acronym stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-bound.
One way of expressing it would be through these questions:
Try to keep things simple by avoiding jargon to create an effective KPI. Everyone within your organization should understand it. To do this, you can use this structure:
Action-Detail-Value-Unit-Deadline
Here’s an example of how that looks:
Add new sales profiles to 80,000 people by 31st December 2022
Beginning with a verb helps clarify your goals. Metrics and units ensure your KPIs are measurable. Finishing with a deadline will do wonders by making your eCommerce KPI is timely.
Ensure your KPIs are measurable. Concluding with a deadline will do wonders by ensuring your eCommerce KPI is timely.
Successful eCommerce companies rely heavily on metrics to make business decisions. They understand their business performance and know the levers to adjust for growth.
There are various KPIs you can track, but only a few represent the state of your company, which can help it grow. Here are the crucial KPIs in eCommerce:
Customer Lifetime Value (CVL) represents the revenue your company earns per customer on average throughout the relationship with the company.
For example, it can compare the value of a customer who purchases $200 now with the value of a customer who purchases ten $100 purchases over the next five years.
Profitability depends on your ability to overcome this acquisition cost. With 76% of companies seeing CLVT as a vital concept in their company, you can use it to determine how valuable your customers are to you.
To better understand your ROI on marketing and customer acquisition campaigns, compare this directly with customer acquisition costs, conversion rates, and traffic.
Cart abandonment rate indicates the percentage of customers who add items to the cart and then back out of their purchase. This metric can help you identify the number of potential customers interested in your products but fail to convert.
There are various reasons for cart abandonment during checkout, with 49% of people opting out due to high costs. By comparing this metric with others on the list, you can devise strategies to reduce abandonment rates and promote sales.
When developing advertising strategies, online advertisers need to consider their return on advertising spending. With return on ad spend-ROAS, you can gauge how efficient an ad campaign is, which will allow you to make adjustments to the campaign accordingly. You can monitor the return on your ad spend to ensure your efforts drive revenue growth.
A customer acquisition cost is a cost of acquiring a customer divided by the number of customers you gain. It can cost you five times more to gain new customers than to keep them. It’s therefore vital to reduce this cost.
It’s okay for an eCommerce company selling $1,000+ items to spend $100 on getting a customer, but if you’re offering $50 items, then you can’t afford that expense. Therefore, keeping your CAC in check should always be your top priority.
Your CAC gives you a clear idea of how many new customers you hope to get over a certain period.
There are various KPIs available to monitor, but not all of them are crucial to your company’s success.
Therefore, here’s how you can choose the right KPI Metrics for your eCommerce:
KPIs are quantifiable measurements that gauge your company’s performance relative to an objective. An example of a KPI could be customer retention.
Therefore, it would help to choose a KPI that directly affects your bottom line - (improving customer retention) supports your overall performance and business strategy.
Keeping track of too many KPIs might lead to you becoming overwhelmed and losing your focus. Every company is unique, making it challenging to develop an exact number of KPIs.
However, two to four KPIs is an excellent range that can give you a sense of where you stand.
It would help base your KPI’s choice on its growth stage-startup vs. enterprise. Some are more crucial than others. It depends on the current growth phase of your business.
KPIs are unique to every business. Therefore, it’s vital to choose metrics relevant to your company, not trends in the industry.
Determining what to track in terms of eCommerce KPI metrics is vital to your company’s success. KPIs like customer lifetime value, cart abandonment rate, return on ad spend, among others mentioned, will help you identify how well your company is performing. They will also help you fine-tune areas where your company might require improvements.
Book a call with one of our strategists to see how Triple Whale can help you visualize and measure your vital ecommerce KPIs.
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