As you pick up your ecommerce business, you begin to track your growth rate and the revenue acquired like a hound dog. While these are the bottom line metric to understand your business situation, it is very important to track these 5 metrics which will help you create a better strategy for your business as well as keep a check on the pulse of your ecommerce site. Google Analytics or whichever analytic tool you might be using is a gold mine of intelligence data on how your customers find your site and how you can optimize it get more customers driven to your site.
Top Metrics Ecommerce Sites Must Track
Bounce Rate: This is the subsequent metric you should track to visitors. Bounce rate is the percentage of your visitors who come to a page on your site and leave without viewing any other page. It is the most important metric after the number of visitors because if your bounce rate is high then most visitors who are coming to your site as simply leaving it without spending time on it. There is no sense in bringing a lot of visitors to your site just so they leave right after coming to your page. Always optimize your landing pages so that the visitor finds it useful and/or converts to a customer.
Cost-per-acquisition: Cost per acquisition is the amount of money you spend on acquiring a single customer. It is calculated by dividing the total amount spent on marketing with the number of customers generated from the same. Every ecommerce company looks to optimize the CPA by acquiring a customer at the lowest possible amount. This is an important metric simply because it can help you set strategic targets on how much money you should spend on acquiring x number of customers as well as optimize it to get more customers with lesser marketing spend.
New Customers vs. Repeat Customers: New customers are the additional users added into the database who have purchased products from your site. Every ecommerce strives to achieve as many new customers as possible and turn them into loyal users who would return for the same/other products on the site. So this metric is important because you need to ensure a constant growth in the number of new customers on your site as well as track how many of them return for another purchase in the future. If you find a very poor number of repeat customers then it might a serious concern for your service or product quality.
RoI: Return of investment is an important metric since it shows how well your business is doing. Returns you generate on your investment for your marketing budget including salaries, advertising etc would be an important parameter to check how soon your business can become profitable or achieve revenue growth.
These are the 5 most important performance metric for an ecommerce site.
