5 KPIs to Watch for Ecommerce | Salsify

It's not enough to have up-to-date data about your brand's performance online, you must know what to do as a result of those statistics. Here are five KPIs we recommend that can help you gauge how best to focus your efforts and keep you well ahead of your competitors on the digital shelf.

1. Online Visibility

Visibility should not be a static aspect of your online business. You should be continuously trying to improve your site’s visibility because it helps to establish and solidify the reputation of your brand and allows new users to locate your site, the success of which hinges on attracting and retaining these new users. However, if people are unable to search your particular brand of products, they will never have the opportunity to make a purchase. 

You need to know exactly where your products appear on search engines and retailer sites. Improving visibility of your products and ecommerce site can entail utilizing SEO tools or ensuring your site has regularly posted, engaging and relevant content that demonstrate the value your site offers.  

2. Conversion Rate

The conversion rate will tell you the percentage of your product page visitors who become customers. You can use the conversion rate to identify which pages on your sales channels are the best performing. Adding video and rich media for certain products or updating call-to-action buttons can be used to improve your conversation rate.  

What type of conversion rate should you aim for? The conversion rate should be continuously improving, or you can use the conversion rates of other similar companies as benchmarks to help determine the weaknesses or strengths of your site’s pages.

3. Shopping Cart Abandonment

Online shopping carts can be abandoned for a myriad of reasons. Some are unavoidable; conducting price comparisons, saving items for later or window shopping are all reasons why users will browse your site without completing a purchase.  

However, other cases of shopping cart abandonment can present prime opportunities to increase your sales. For example, the results of one study show that 60 percent of shoppers will discard their shopping cart because of additional miscellaneous costs, such as taxes, fees and shipping costs. A complicated checkout process and misgivings about your website’s security are also issues that can prompt shopping cart abandonment. 

Monitoring shopping cart abandonment for your site can help you determine if there are obstacles that your customers are encountering when checking out. If so, you should focus on making the checkout process as seamless and transparent as possible. Consider using the removal of shipping costs when customers have a certain dollar amount of items in their cart to encourage completed purchases. 

4. Onsite Traffic

Website traffic directly influences the amount of online sales you have, which makes monitoring onsite traffic analytics a necessity. Onsite traffic can tell you which channels, including organic, advertising, social or email channels, are responsible for the majority of your online shoppers and can point you to the right marketing and engagement strategies to implement to drive more traffic to your online store. You will be able to learn when customers are visiting your site, the pages they are accessing, how long they are staying and whether they are converting to customers. For a site that is properly optimized to convert visitors to shoppers, the resultant increase in traffic is likely to result in more customers and sales.  

5. Customer Lifetime Value

For ecommerce business owners, the acquisition and retention of customers is becoming more difficult as market saturation increases and competition grows. This is why it is important to cultivate loyal customers, specifically those who provide both short-term and long-term profitability. 

Tracking customer lifetime value metrics, or the projected sales or revenue a person can generate during their time as a customer of your business, can help you understand what your acquisition strategies should be and how to optimize them. You will be able to identify which customers you should be prioritizing and how valuable they are to your business. Once these types of customers and their characteristics are identified, new loyal customers can be targeted with more effective messaging and nurturing strategies. Consider the additional value and customer services resources you will be able to offer to these customers. You will be spending less and making more effective spending decisions, as the costs associated with retaining high-value customers is less than the costs associated with acquiring them.