21 Critical eCommerce Metrics For Tracking Your Business Performance.

eCommerce site is fairly easy to own these days, but it’s running one that is profitable that where most Store Owners fall short. You might be wondering why your eCommerce business isn’t profitable. It’s simple, you’re not tracking the right eCommerce KPIs. Your business can’t survive if you’re not following how you’re doing and compare progress over time.

It is tough knowing the right KPIs to monitor, especially if you’re just starting out your eCommerce business. That’s why in this post, we have listed out 12 critical eCommerce KPIs to track that will create a huge impact on your business when you optimize them.

Without further ado, let’s dive in.

eCommerce KPIs Related to Website Visitors

Gaining visibility and brand awareness with your target customer is one of the most initial goals for an eCommerce business. It’s not only brand awareness you’ll want, but also you’ll actually want to get people clicking over to your site, with the hope that they convert to buyers.

Below are KPIs to pay close attention to when concentrating on your first-time visitors:

Metrics #1: Impressions

Impressions are the number of times your content is displayed or presented to an individual, no matter if the viewer engages with it or not, it will still count as an impression. It’s also important to note that an individual could have multiple impressions for a single piece of content.

For example, when you publish a Facebook post it will show up on your News Feeds and it will also appear again when a friend shares the post. If you saw those two activities in your feed, that counts as two impressions for the same post.

The number of impressions you generate can help you understand, whether your content marketing and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) have been successful. However, impressions and visibility are only the beginning.

Metric #2: Click-Through Rate

Getting your brand noticed is important, but getting your ideal audience/consumers to actually click over to your site is much more important.

With that said, you’ll want to keep track of your click-through rate (CTR) for each channel your content or ads are visible on. You can do this by dividing the number of persons who clicked on your ad or link by the total number of impressions said ad or link generated. For example, 1,000 people seeing your ad, and ten of them deciding to click on it, your CTR would be:
10 / 1,000 = 0.01, or 1%

Although impressions give you a clue of how often your ads or content are seen, CTR gives you a bit more insight into how people are engaging with the ads or content. Letting you know that those who click on the ad or content are likely interested in learning more about what your company has to offer.

You should also pay attention to which specific pages on your website your visitors click over to most often once they’re actually are on your site. Typically, you’d want more people to check out your category and product pages than your About Us page; if you see a discrepancy between these numbers, you’ll want to look closely at the numbers to figure out where the problem lies.

Impressions and Click-through rates are the basic KPIs to keep track of when it comes to who’s clicking over to your website. Further down this post, we’ll revisit metrics that relate to visitors who click over to your site and stick around.

eCommerce Metrics Relating to Mailing List Subscribers

Having a mailing list allows you to constantly engage with those who have shown an active interest in your brand’s offerings by giving you their name and email – whether they’ve actually made a purchase or not.
You’ll want to keep track of a few metrics relating to this list.

Metric #3 Subscription Rate

Your subscription rate is the percentage of people who sign up for your mailing list after visiting your site, by the total number of visitors your site has generated.

If your subscription rate is lower than you’d hoped, you’ll want to experiment with a few tactics such as including popups, streamlining the subscription process, optimizing your CTA, and improving your newsletter’s value proposition.

Metric #4: Email Open Rate

As the name indicates, your email open rate refers to the number of times a particular email is opened by your subscribers, compared to the total number of people the email was sent to.

There are a number of reasons that can affect an open rate, such as:
Email subject line
How your company/name appears in the “From” field
The time of day you send the email
The day you send the email out in a week

In addition, a low open rate over an extended period of time may be a sign that you need to clean up your mailing list by deleting subscribers who haven’t opened your emails in a long while.

Metric #5: Email Click-Through Rate

Going a step further, email click-through rate refers to the number of persons who clicked the link(s) included within a particular email, as compared to the total number of people you sent the email to.
Since a person will have to open the email first in order to click the link included within, the above reasons also influence email CTR.

Moreover, email CTR is also dependent on the content of the email (whether it be text copy or any multimedia which may be included), the value provided by the email (and the value that you promise to provide in the linked content), and the call-to-action in the email.

Metric #6: Unsubscribe Rate

To calculate the unsubscribe rate for your mailing list use the formulary below:
(Number of unsubscription / Number of emails sent) x 100

From a glance, you should be able to see how effective and valuable your emails are and campaigns are to your audience by looking at the unsubscription rate.

However, taking a look deeper, you might find that those who have unsubscribed did so for various other reasons that don’t necessarily reflect negatively on the value of your content. For example, perhaps they subscribed in order to gain access to a specific piece of content, for instance, an ebook, but realized your content simply wasn’t for them.

With that in mind, go back to your website and make sure you are very clear to explain who the freebie/offer is for and what they stand to benefit from signing up for your mailing list.

Metric #7 Spam Complaint Rate

Getting the spam complaint rate, simply calculate it the same way as the unsubscribe rate, but exchanging the number of unsubscribers with the number of spam reports.
Try to keep your spam rate as low as possible (below 0.1%, hopefully).

While a recipient can send an email you sent to spam rather than unsubscribing from your list once in a while, but having a higher-than-normal spam complaint rate may also be a sign that your emails actually looks like a “typical” spam in some way – and are therefore seen as annoying and/or worthless in the eyes of your recipients. This will mean you’ll have to go back to the drawing board to figure out exactly what the problem could be.

Metric #8: List Growth Rate

Here you basically want to look at how many subscribers you currently have in your list, in comparison to the number of subscribers you had at the beginning of a designated time period (It could be the past month, or quarter, or year).

Calculate what the list growth rate is by using the following formula:
([(Number of new subscribers) – (Number of unsubscribers + spam complaints)] / Total number of mailing list subscribers]) x 100

A lower-than-expected list growth rate can potentially be attributed to most everything we’ve spoken about so far, from impressions to Click through rates to whether the content given is valuable. Nevertheless, you’ll need to dig much deeper to determine the true source of the issue, here.

Metric #9: Conversion Rate

Email conversion rate refers to the percentage of email subscribers who clicked through to your website from an email, and who also completed a specified task while on-site.

For example, if an email is promoting an offer for 35% off a specific product, and included a link to that particular product page when a subscriber clicks through to that page, that instances will be referred to as a conversion seen as the subscriber went through with the purchase.

A quick note: Here’s a good example of a case in which a metric can be seen as a KPI in one aspect and as a vanity metric in another. The goal of an email like that above would be to increase conversions, meaning conversion rate is the KPI we are looking for. With that said, even if the open rate of the said email was an astounding 100%, this stat would be pretty worthless if it didn’t result in an increase in conversion rate.

eCommerce Metrics For Shoppers/Browsers

It’s critical to take note of how your visitors act once they’re actually on your website.

Metric #10: Add to Cart Rate

Add to cart rate tells you what percentage of your website visitors actually added a product to their shopping cart.

Your add to cart rate tells you:
Whether you’re attracting the right audience
If your website visitors come with a specific purpose in mind or if they’re “just looking around”.
It also tells you whether your products and/or prices are in line with your target consumers’ expectations

Metric #11: Visitors Time on Site and Number of Pageviews per Visit

One thing to note about these metrics is that higher-than-average time on site and pageviews per visit might mean your site is engaging, and that your visitors find your products interesting; but if you notice they are spending too much time clicking around from page to page without making a purchase, it may be a sign that your site confuses them or causes them to dilly-dally in some way or another.

Metric #12: Bounce Rate

The bounce rate tells you the percentage of visitors to your website who leave it after only visiting one page.

When compared to the above metrics, a high bounce rate essentially means that the content on the specific page in question isn’t very engaging and/or valuable to the individual who landed on it.

Usually, a high bounce rate is a result of the inconsistency between the expected value of a site (which the visitor saw from the ad or search result data associated with your website) and the actual value and relevance of the site once they enter it.

eCommerce Metrics For Buyers/Customers
It’s time for us to take a look at metrics that deal with those who have made a purchase from your online store.