E-Commerce has leveled the playing field for small businesses. For the first time, small stores can compete with huge companies with the right understanding of their target audience, digital strategy, and creative content. Stores can attract and serve customers from around the world easily. This opens up new opportunities as well as new competition. The more globally connected customers are, the more options they have to choose from.
When you do get potential customers to your site, your user experience will be what sets you apart and generates the sales you want. Your e-Commerce site is like a machine that needs to have all the moving parts working together to keep cranking out results. The best way to make sure all the parts of your site are performing their best and to determine where you can improve is to track KPIs, Key Performance Indicators. Your KPIs tell you how well your site is working for you and where you should make adjustments. A good grasp on KPIs and how to improve them will make sure your e-Commerce site consistently gets the results you want to generate more revenue.
Here are the top 10 e-Commerce KPIs to track on your site:
1. Traffic source.
Your traffic source KPI gives you a complete breakdown of where visitors are coming from and how they found your site. This will tell you where you are more successful at driving traffic: organic search, paid ads, social media, referrals, etc. This way, you can better understand your customers’ buying process. Are they researching questions and content before purchasing and they often come in through organic traffic? Do they click on your social ads? Are your influencer referral links performing best? This will help you better understand where to focus your efforts as well as where you can improve.
2. Bounce Rate.
Your bounce rate measures how many users exit your site after online visiting one page. A high bounce rate indicates that customers are getting to your page, maybe they are enticed by ads or content, but whatever page they’re landing on it not resonating with them. This means you need to make adjustments to improve your landing page experience so that users don’t bounce. Bounce rate is actually a big part of SEO as well as sales. If your bounce rate is high, Google considers your page to be less relevant for your target audience. Some good ways to reduce bounce rate are to add enticing CTAs on the landing page, improve loading time, and keep relevant content for the right visitors. Learn more on how to decrease the bounce rate with easy interface tricks.
3. Email and notifications opt-ins.
About 92% of first-time visitors to your website aren’t ready to buy. If you aren’t going to convert them right away, what are you going to do to bring them back? You don’t want to lose an interested potential customers. Driving traffic to your site is expensive and time consuming. You need to get customer emails or get them to opt-in to notifications so you can reach back out once they leave. Your opt-in rates for email and notifications are important because they show who you still have the potential to sell to from your traffic. Interestingly, 71% of mobile purchases are influenced by emails from the retailer. The power here is huge!
Some great ways to collect customer emails:
- Landing pages outperform popups in capturing emails for eCommerce. Build a landing page dedicated to a campaign, sale, or discount incentive. Learn more on how to create a better converting landing page for e-Commerce.
- Slide-ins at a further point in the browsing process with discount incentive.
- Permanent top banners and sidebars with opt-in
New and even outperforming email in some areas, push notifications are becoming more popular for eCommerce. You can use push notifications to update users on new products, flash sales, new shipments, etc. They can click on them and be lead to your site right away. It’s more engaging and less steps that email. Beamer is a great way to send push notifications and update customers. Beamer is a newsfeed that sits within your eCommerce site where you can share updates. You can add photos and videos to make them more engaging. Your updates can be segmented and targeted to specific users by demographic, location, language, and past behavior on your site. For example, you can offer specific discounts and recommend products based on previous purchases. You can configure Beamer to send push notifications out to those who have opted in when you post new updates. It’s the best way to drive interested customers back to your site in an easier and more in context way.
4. Pages per session.
This is an interesting and often overlooked metric but it can be really powerful for eCommerce in particular. It’s related to bounce rate but offers a little more insight. If potential customers are looking through more pages on your site, they are spending more time, and exploring more products. The brick and mortar store equivalent would be how long the customer spends browsing and looking at products. If they spend all their time on your homepage but don’t progress to browsing other pages, it’s likely that they found a reason to bounce. However, if they go through 10 of your product pages, you’ve attracted someone who is interested in what you have. They are more likely to buy if they explore your products, of course. To increase this, make sure that there are enticing suggestions on where to go next for customers. Offer related products, new products, and organize by interesting categories that make customers want to see more.
5. Conversion by traffic source.
Your conversion by traffic source digs deeper into your conversion rate to determine which of your channels are performing the best and what is not. Your site may be converting wonderfully through organic traffic from your content and your less so with ads. This information is really valuable. This can help you either make the adjustments necessary to improve the channels that are not converting well to boost revenue and or focus your efforts on your top performing channels. This way you can be better focused about where your team puts in time and money to maximize revenue and keep costs low.
“My top growth hack is to master a single customer acquisition channel before moving on to another.”
– Andrew Youdarian, ECommerceFuel.com
6. Conversion by device type (mobile, PC).
This is another metric that drills down your conversion rate so you can improve your site and generate more revenue. Conversion by device type lets you know where customers spend the most money and where they are more likely to buy from you: mobile, desktop, or iPad/tablet. This is hugely important because it really tells you how effective your user experience is on each of these. Poor performance indicates your user experience is not up to par on that device and can be improved to maximize revenue. This really clues you into your customers’ behavior. By 2021, mobile ecommerce sales are expected to account for 54% of total eCommerce sales. Ensuring you have a healthy conversion on the devices that your customers are using to shop is vital.
7. Customer acquisition cost.
Your customer acquisition cost lets you know how much is it going to cost you to convert a brand new customer. Understanding this can help you keep costs as low as possible to increase profits. With eCommerce, customer acquisition costs can get high if you are putting a lot of money into bringing leads through ads and Adwords. Since eCommerce generally has marginal profits, this is dangerous. CAC is something you definitely want to keep an eye on and learn ways to manage.
A few things that are helpful for decreasing CAC:
- Give customers discounts for referrals
- Focus on bringing back repeat buyers by sending effective updates
- Create a content strategy to drive organic traffic
- Work with influencers to target your ideal audience in a powerful way
8. Average order value.
Your average order value tells you how much a customer is spending on average when they check out. Obviously, it’s in your best interest to increase this number to increase revenue. The most each customer spends at each checkout, the less converting you have to worry about. Some easy ways to do this on an eCommerce site are:
- Bundle products and offer a discount
- Recommend complementing products
- Offer free shipping on orders above a certain price
9. Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate.
This one is inherently important to any kind of e-Commerce site. Your shopping cart abandonment rate lets you know how many people actually browse through your shop, add to their cart, and end up bouncing before ever checking out. If your shopping cart abandonment rate is high, this is an indication that there is something within the actually conversion/check out process that is making potential customers turn back. It could be the process itself as in the payment process is not optimal and too rigorous, or it could be that your offering is not attractive. Are your shipping costs boosting the total too much for shoppers? Work in free shipping into pricing so the total isn’t terrifying. Do they not feel confident in trusting your product to check out? Add reviews and ratings as well as add in a free return policy to make it a little easier. Another simple tactic is to add special deal for a limited time to push checkout. For instance, offer the customer 10% off if they order within the next few hours with a countdown.
10. Percentage of returning buyers.
Your percentage of returning buyers lets you know how many of the people you’re converting are returning customers. It costs you five times more to get a new customer than it does to keep an old one. So the more you increase your percentage of returning buyers, the less you can spend on acquiring new customers to increase revenue.
Some ways you can increase returning buyers are:
- Have a good system for reaching back out to your customers through multiple channels: email, push notifications, social media, retargeting, etc.
- Keep them updated with a tool like Beamer: letting them know about new products, sending personalized discounts and offers.
- Have time sensitive incentives like flash sales to keep customers interested.
Again, making sure your customers are satisfied is the best way to guarantee this. Go beyond on the perks. For example, 92% of consumers surveyed said that they will buy again if the product return process is easy.
The more you can track and improve these e-commerce KPIs, the more your site will become like a well-oiled machine generating revenue effortlessly. For a really easy way to both engage shoppers on your site and bring them back to your shop, try Beamer.
