What if you don’t get enough return on your investment after making all the efforts to establish an ecommerce business? You’ll have to redefine your business model from every aspect to make substantial profits. How would you know whether or not your website is performing well? That’s when ecommerce metrics come into play to help you measure your success. These metrics are critical to determining the right strategies for your business. There are hundreds of metrics out there relevant to ecommerce websites and stores. Here, we have gathered only the most significant metrics that affect ecommerce businesses directly. Keep reading for the details.
The lifecycle of a buyer consists of 5 stages namely discovery, consideration, conversion, retention, and advocacy. In the discovery stage, people come to know about your business and actively engage with your products or services. During the consideration stage, they proceed to click on a link, subscribe to a newsletter, or like, share your posts and comment on them. The conversion stage is the most important as visitors turn into customers in this phase. Retention stage deals with metrics related to repeat customers. And the final stage is advocacy. This stage comprises the metrics that indicate how satisfied your existing customers are and whether they refer your business to other people. Delve into the next sections to know more about these elements of ecommerce analytics.
Impressions and Reach
The number of times your content, post, or ad appears before someone is called impressions. These impressions come from a variety of sources such as paid ads, organic search, third-party websites, social media, and more. Impressions don’t mean engagement. Impressions only refer to the visibility of your content.
Reach refers to the number of your total fans, followers, and subscribers across all platforms including email, Facebook, Instagram, and your ecommerce site. All those people who will see your content accumulate the number of reaches.
Cost Per Acquisition
Every customer comes to your store at the expense of an acquisition cost. Email marketing paid to advertise, and any other marketing campaign requires investment to function effectively. You can drive traffic to your website and generate sales through these marketing funnels. What if your customer acquisition cost exceeds your total revenue? That’s the reason you must pay close attention to CPA (cost per acquisition).
Organic Traffic
Organic search traffic implies the number of your total visitors who reach your website organically, without being pushed by any paid ads. More organic traffic means you have good SEO health and an optimized website capable of attracting visitors naturally. Check your websites regularly for SEO issues. All these SEO metrics are significant to the success of your ecommerce business.
Email Open Rate & Click-through Rate
Email open rate represents the percentage of people who open your email when you run email campaigns. A higher open rate means more people receive your emails and open them. And the next metric click-through rate refers to the number of times people clicked through your website. A standard email open rate ranges between 15-25% and the average click-through rate is 2-5%.
Conversion Rate
Conversion rate is the percentage of users who make a purchase or make a decision as you intended to the total number of visitors to your website. Divide the number of conversions by the number of visitors to get the conversion rate. A conversion rate measuring higher than 3% is considered good compared to the average conversion rate of 2.86%. This means 2.86 visitors make a purchase among 100 visitors to an ecommerce site.
Social Media Analytics
Every internet user has multiple social media accounts. Social media platforms are a great source of sales nowadays. Keep track of your social media KPIs at regular intervals. Likes, shares, comments, and clicks are a few factors that determine your success in social media marketing. Check for the traffic you get within a given period of time through social media.
Cart Abandonment Rate
A large number of users add something to their cart but leave the website without completing the transaction. This stage of the lifecycle journey is termed cart abandonment. Cart abandonment rate is the percentage of visitors who leave the cart midway out of the total number of shopping carts created. This measure is very important since it tells of the interest of potential customers who, for some reason, can’t make it to final checkout. To be more sure about the reasons behind cart abandonment, you can search for checkout abandonment rates which specifically inform about the faults of the payment and checkout process.
Average Order Value
AOV aka average order value informs about the total amount of money your customers spend on your business while checking out. You can determine the growth rate of your company by analyzing this metric. See how your business is evolving with time considering the average order value. Keep trying to embark on a progressive journey with an all-out marketing effort.
Customer Lifetime Value
CLV refers to the total amount of money a business owner earns from customers throughout their whole life. If you earn less customer lifetime value compared to the money you invest in acquiring new customers, you need to rethink your business strategies and come up with more effective ways to increase the CLV.
Customer Retention Rate
Acquiring a new buyer cost at least 5 times more than retaining an old customer. This cost may go as high as 25 times. Customer retention rate lets business owners know how many of their customers come back to buy again out of the total number of their customers. A higher retention rate means you’re doing great with your ecommerce business.
Refund & Return Rate
Both refunds and returns are detrimental to your business. Measure these metrics and take the necessary steps to minimize them as much as possible. Refund and return policies are integral parts of ecommerce stores. Keep your business running in such a manner so that you hardly need to effectuate these policies.
Churn Rate
Churn rate is a complex type of metric that represents the number of visitors lost within a specific time period. Keep your visitors and customers happy to achieve a sustainable low churn rate. A high churn rate indicates a big loss as far as customer acquisition cost is concerned.
Net Promoter Score
Word of mouth is very important. A satisfied customer can cause a substantial increase in your customer base by spreading positive thoughts about your business. NPS aka net promoter score informs about the popularity of your business among your customers. You can find out how willingly your customers refer your business to people they know. This score represents the overall performance of your business from the perspective of customers. That’s the reason this metric matters so much.
The ultimate goal of every business owner is to make profits and run their business with a reputation. How would business owners know whether they’re making significant profits to operate their online store platforms in the long run? You can keep track of the success or failure of your business only by analyzing relevant ecommerce metrics.
These analytics are the numerical representation of your business in every aspect. They are very important to help you understand the performance of your venture. You should measure all these metrics timely to keep your ecommerce store running successfully.
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