12 Essential E-Commerce KPIs To Measure & Grow Your Sales

One of the biggest advantages of selling online is that you can easily measure the success of your marketing campaigns. Knowing and understanding how to measure success in your strategic planning is a pivotal part of implementing your digital marketing strategy. However, measuring performance can be quite tricky.

As an organization that has invested a lot of money on products, services, and marketing campaigns, it’s only right that you keep track of your marketing campaigns and make informed decisions, especially when it comes to budgeting for your search engine optimization or SEO strategy, based on insightful data. But you have to make sure that you are completely aware of what data to prioritize in measuring.

So, what should you measure?

Measuring Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) is crucial to your success.

What exactly are KPIs and why do you need to measure them?

• KPIs are considered scorecards for monitoring your company health. By checking your business’ vital signs, you will know where to focus your time, energy, and energy. You’ll be able to measure what you should put more emphasis on to save time and resources.
• KPIs allow you to measure progress over time so you can set targets at the start of every year and quarter. KPIs will help you determine the progress you are making toward your goals and business strategy.
• Measuring the right KPIs will also help you make the necessary adjustments and stay on track with your goals. You’ll be able to foresee any obstacles that you are likely to encounter so you can formulate a plan to overcome them before they even happen.
• You’ll be able to solve problems or identify opportunities using a combination of KPIs that can help you turn your business around. This can help you identify opportunities that will allow you to generate more predictable sales.
•  Measuring the same KPIs over some time will help identify patterns in your data. This can help you identify your lean seasons, which can be used to focus your energy on other important business activities, like revamping your website or improving other aspects of your campaigns.

Most important e-commerce KPIs to tracks

For a company that spends a good amount of money on paid ads but is only getting a low order value, you need to revisit your strategy to know which elements to track to improve your strategic planning.

Here are the most vital e-commerce KPIs you need to track and measure.

1. CONVERSION RATE

Conversion rate has to be the most important KPI for e-commerce sites. This is the number of visitors that engage and finish the sales funnel divided by the total number of visitors a site has. In short, conversion rate indicates that your business strategies are actually getting your audience to engage with your site and buy whatever it is you’re offering.

Ultimately, conversion rate impacts virtually all other KPIs. This means that making the necessary adjustments to improve your conversion rate will also improve other elements in your stats. One of the most effective ways to improving your conversion rate is through onsite optimization split-testing.

2. CONVERSION RATE PER TRAFFIC CHANNEL

This gives you crucial information on where to focus your budget so you don’t waste money. It will also show you how various channels are performing so can stop spending money where your campaigns are not performing well.

3. CUSTOMER LIFETIME VALUE (CLTV)

This is another important metric that truly captures the true health of your e-commerce website since reflects conversion rate, return customer rate, and average order value.

If you want to succeed online, you need to build strong connections with your target audience. By improving user experience, you are increasing the value of each of your customers. As a result, your brand becomes your customers’ go-to place for the solutions that you offer. This is why you need to measure how much revenue your customers generate over their lifetime is important. By doing so, you’ll be able to invest in the right channels.

4. CUSTOMER RETENTION RATE

Yes, it’s important to expand as a business and reach new customers. However, the long-term success of a brand often lies in its ability to retain customers. When the majority of your customers come back to do repeat business, it’s a telltale sign that your e-commerce marketing strategy is working. This is especially true if repeat customers refer you to new customers.

This is why you should measure customer retention rate to see if your customers are combing. If you do, you’ll also be able to determine what could possibly be driving them away. What’s more, you’ll also be able to discover new channels that will allow you to attract new customers.

5. AVERAGE ORDER VALUE (AOV)

This refers to the average value of every customer’s purchase in your online store. To calculate the AOV, you must divide the sum value of all sales by the number of carts checked out. Monitoring the AOV lets you establish benchmarks to determine how you can get more customers to spend more every time they make a purchase.

One way to get customers to spend more money is to offer discounts if they purchase different products as a package. You can also offer free shipping if they reach a certain threshold to entice them to spend more. Additionally, you can upsell complementary items.

6. CUSTOMER ACQUISITION COST (CAC)

Growing your customer base over time is important, but it’s only a part of the bigger picture.

If you’re spending an average of $100 to acquire all your customers but are only getting $90 as average order value, then you’re operating at a loss. This is where you need to calculate your customer acquisition cost. This helps you track the average cost of acquiring a single customer, which includes your marketing and sales cost, hosting your e-commerce site, and paying your staff.

To reduce your CAC, you can optimize your advertising so you can spend less for each acquired customer. Another way to reduce CAC is by investing in SEO, social media marketing, and other organic marketing strategies.

7. CART ABANDONMENT RATE

When your e-commerce site has a high cart abandonment rate, not only are you losing sales but you’re most likely also losing customers, which could be caused by several reasons.

One, it could be because your site has a complicated checkout process that can turn potential customers off. Two, it can be caused by slow load time, especially when there are a lot of things going on your checkout page. Remember that users have very short attention spans, which means that they can be quite impatient.

Monitor possible friction points that are putting people off and turning them away from your online store.

8. BOUNCE RATE

This refers to the percentage of visitors who quickly exit your site after only viewing a single page. For e-commerce sites, bounce rates can be quite high, indicating several issues with your user experience. Use Google Analytics to keep track of your bounce rates.

9. RETURN ON AD SPEND (ROAS)

As an e-commerce business that spends on online advertising, you need to assess how effective your ad campaigns are so you will know the necessary changes you need to make to improve their performances. In other words, you are monitoring return on ad spend to ensure your campaigns are helping increase your revenues.

10. COST PER ACQUISITION (CPA)

CPA is the key performance indicator that calibrates all the other KPIs to ensure that all of them are performing at optimum levels. By measuring your CPA, you’ll be able to safely project your ROI, which will help you evaluate whether your business is ready to expand.

11. CUSTOMER SATISFACTION

If you’ve been making adjustments to improve the overall user experience in your site, you’ll know whether they are working or not primarily through your conversion rate. Aside from that, you will know if you have an improved return on ad spend, cart abandonment rate, and average order value.

12.ORGANIC SEARCH RANKINGS

Your search rankings will provide you with vital information on the growth performance of your business. This means that you need to make sure your on-page and off-page optimization efforts are working extremely well to rank on the first page of search engine results pages.

Final thoughts

If you’re not familiar with all the e-commerce KPIs mentioned above, then it’s high time you learn all of them to ensure that you’ll be able to effectively measure your marketing efforts. By doing so, you’ll be able to highlight areas that need improvement to maximize your marketing spending.