Do You Understand Your eCommerce Website?

eCommerce metrics are numbers that tell us important information about certain processes that we have undertaken on our eCommerce sites. They are accurate measurements and give us an idea if our processes are working the way they should, whilst providing us with an understanding of how we can improve these processes. By using metrics, we can help our online business perform better continuously

By far the most important metric is conversion rate. You should monitor the conversion rates throughout your whole sales funnel. By doing so, you will be able to understand at which point of the funnel you are losing potential customers and focus on these areas that need improvement.

Traffic sources and related metrics are also extremely important. These give you information about the origin of your visitors and their visiting patterns. Furthermore, youll have additional information about inbound links including emails, affiliates, paid search and more. Google Analytics is a great way to track such information.

metrics that can be tracked by Google Analytics include:

  • Bounce Rates can give you information on which pages in your website need to be improved, as these are pages that people leave straight away without taking any action on your site.

  • Exit Pages tell you where users are generally leaving your website, for example, a common exit point tends to be a newsletter sign up page, which is required in your sales checkout funnel.

  • Devices used tell you which devices your website visitors are using and give you enough information to decide whether its feasible to develop mobile sites or apps in order to make your customers experience simpler for the platform they are using.

Ive created a more complex overview for you to illustrate the sales funnel, as well as the metrics better. Click the thumbnail to enlarge.

Other data that you can track is page behavior including information from which pages visitors are entering and exiting your site. This would give you insight on the most relevant search queries associated with your website, whilst it would also give you information on which pages are getting your users frustrated and abandoning your site from.

Further important metrics are your sales metrics, including your average order value, number of orders and more. Obviously, average order value is of extreme importance. Even if your conversion remains constant, if the average order value increases you are to see an increase in your overall revenue.

Customer-related metrics, such as number of new vs returning customers, top 10 customer locations, number of abandoned cart and newsletter signups can help you better analyse your customers, find out what they need and try to increase their satisfaction.

If you are using campaigns and vouchers on your eCommerce site, it is extremely important to keep an eye on the reach of each marketing activity that you organise, including the click-through rate for each activity, number of coupon codes redeemed, campaign impressions and so forth. This would allow you to understand which campaigns are more successful, and which need more attention and optimisation.

With campaigns, it is important to also calculate your ROI in order to understand which tactics are most effective and how much of your budgets you should invest in certain funnels. Promotions and campaigns in Google Analytics allows you to track revenue, average order size and other metrics for each promotion and campaign you run. That makes it very targeted and powerful for your reporting.

All kinds of metrics can give you information for improvement and allow you to take informed decisions on various parts of your sales funnel.

Apart from the above-mentioned essential metrics there are numerous others that you can and should consider to continuously improve the performance of any eCommerce business. Each part of the eCommerce pre-sales, sales and post-sales process supplies you with data that allows you to understand your eCommerce site better, identify weak spots and enhance accordingly.

ARTICLE SOURCE: This factual content has not been modified from the source. This content is syndicated news that can be used for your research, and we hope that it can help your productivity. This content is strictly for educational purposes and is not made for any kind of commercial purposes of this blog.