Top 10 Ecommerce Metrics Which Anyone Should Track

Smart businesses depend on the relevant metrics and data which plays a big role in today's digital world. Any e-commerce business that fails to track the right metrics is sure to face the consequences. E-commerce in itself is a big industry, and sustaining it isn't easy.

We know that today's generation loves to shop irrespective of their needs, and hence, it is even more challenging to sustain along with changing preferences. Gone are the days when e-commerce was only about selling and buying items on the internet. It is increasingly becoming more and more competitive with the latest trends, technologies, and giants like Amazon and Flipkart dominating the market.

In case you are struggling to get traction already, you should know that you are doing something wrong. What you should focus on is the metrics. Your e-commerce metrics will help you understand what is lacking and what you need. Based on these metrics, you can hit your next home run to score a big win in the digital world.

10 Metrics to Win the E-commerce Game

E-commerce is constantly becoming a competitive business, and surviving in the long run alongside the giants is challenging. However, it all comes down to how well you know what you are doing. People say that it is unpredictable to win an e-commerce race, but that is not true. We are living in a world where everything about online sites can be tracked. You need the right data metrics to build the strategy for your e-commerce website successfully.

1. Customer Lifetime Value

The customer is king. Be it offline or online, you cannot sustain in the market unless you value your customer. At the same time, a small shop becomes a big brand only because of customer loyalty. So, all you have to do is track your customer's journey on your e-commerce website.

Track the first 4 purchases of your customer and understand their journey and buying preferences. This will help you retain the current customer. The time and effort you put into retaining are way lesser than acquiring a new customer. Plus, if you serve well word-of-mouth marketing will automatically help you acquire new customers.

Try understanding the following two metrics to understand customer lifetime value:

• Historical Customer Lifetime Value – value based upon the past purchases
• Predictive historical lifetime value – Predicted customer value based on past behavior

2. Sales conversion rate

Tracking your website traffic can be one of the metrics to help you understand user behavior. You can do this with the help of an effective marketing strategy. However, measuring conversion rates is very different from measuring traffic. Therefore, you need better tracking software like Google Analytics. You can measure the number of visitors, but that does not give you the right metric for measuring conversion.

You can simply check the total sales metrics on your preferred analytics platform, and bam, there you are.

3. Average order value

Every e-commerce store owner wants to earn more and wants to sell more. You should not think differently. But you have to take some concrete steps to make sure you are making more sales. Tracking your marketing campaigns can help, but flashing expensive products will not, and it does not. If that is happening to you, the best way is to keep a tab on your customers' spending behavior. After this, calculate the Average Order Value depending on the product sales made over a certain period.

4. Cart abandonment rate

Cart abandonment is an e-commerce-only problem that speaks a lot about user behavior and buyer persona. You might be using a cart to save the products you plan to buy in the future. It helps you keep a tab on the products, and if you are lucky, you also get the added advantage of getting a small discount exclusively for you. The cart abandonment rate gives you an idea of the number of purchases the user might have left incomplete for various reasons. It could be due to not-so-secure payment gateways or a lengthy checkout process, and so on.

5. Email conversion rate

Email marketing has been the talk of the town for almost 10 years now. Since the beginning of e-commerce, sending out emails to attract more customers has been a working technique. However, if you do not track the right metrics, the chances are that your email conversion rate might never come up. You have to track metrics like open rate, bounce rate, unsubscribed rate, and so on to understand how much returns you are getting from your email marketing campaign.

6. Social Media Conversion

Social media following can seem like a significant achievement, but it is of no use if you cannot bring conversions from there. Tracking your Instagram accounts for understanding how your audience interacts with you can be one way to get more conversions. Tracking social media does not mean you judge your authority based on the number of likes, comments, or retweets. Your strategy to bring conversions from social media should focus on more meaningful metrics. You can always use tools like Google Analytics to understand the traffic you get from different social platforms.

7. Revenue as per Traffic Sources

Alright, you have built a good e-commerce website, and you are getting good traffic too. But is this traffic getting converted to revenue. To understand this, you have to keep track of the revenue you get from individual traffic sources. It will help you realize if your traffic is bringing you only visitors or customers. Understanding these metrics can help you optimize the paid ads cost on different channels.

8. Customer Acquisition Cost

As the name suggests, Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) is the cost of acquiring new customers. The acquisition helps in increasing the ROI of your company and also brings new customers to your platform. Once you evaluate the costs spent on acquisition, you have to find out which platforms or mediums bring you more customers at less cost. This will help you increase the ROI of your e-commerce business.

9. Returning Customer Percentage

We have reached the almost end of the blog, and by now, you might have already realized that it is not a good practice to spend on acquiring new customers. The more customers you retain, the less you spend, and you acquire more by retaining more. So, keep track of the returning customer to understand what you are doing right that the customers decide to stay with you.

10. Website Engagement

Engagement is not only an email or social media but also a website. Your website speaks a lot about engagement, and it should be considered in the race without fail. The reason is, you cannot convert your visitor into customers if you cannot keep them on your website for a long time. The five metrics you can search on your Google Analytics could be:

• Session duration
• Unique session
• Bounce rate
• Returning vs. New customers
• Pages per session

If you are running an e-commerce business or website, we recommend following the above metrics carefully and wisely. Working on the digital front is as difficult or challenging as on the offline front, but you can make it easier if you have the right tools and metrics in hand to make it all sound cool and perfect.