55 Ecommerce metrics to know

Customer stages in sales funnel

1) impressions 2) inbound traffic 3) conversions 4) customer lifetime value 5) customer sentiment

Sessions

A single user can open multiple sessions on various devices or browsers; sessions typically end after 30 minutes of inactivity; all interactions by a visitor on your website within a given timeframe such as page views, events, social interactions, and commerce transactions will register as a single session

Impact of customer retention rate improvement

According taboo, 5% increase in customer retention rate will result in 25% to 95% increase in profits

Pages / sessions

Average number of pages viewed per session

Customer lifetime value (CLV, CLTV, LTV, or LCV)

Customer lifetime value is the expected revenue generated by future sales interactions with a customer

Influencers and partners (data to know about them)

Details about their number of monthly readers (total and organic), as well as the size of their email list; research their social media followings and how engaged their audiences are across platforms; they may have a large twitter following, but they don't get many retweets so it may be better to leverage you partnership through their instagram platform instead

Users

Does not necessarily equate to individual users or people; it is a cookie set by each visitor's browser; so, if a customer of yours logged in from her phone and then her desktop computer, each session will register as two users; the walk-around to this anomaly is setting up session unification b integrating logged in user data with google analytics

Facebook & Instagram's reach metric

Facebook measures unique impressions with a reach metric; number of people that have seen your ads at least once; the key point to note here is that the reach metric is different from impressions, which may include multiple views of your ads by the same people

Google Adwords and Bing ads

For Adwords, pay attention to "impressions" metrics, which is the number of times you ads are shown on search result pages or the display network on both platforms

Brand's online visibility

Google adwords: create a brand name search campaign and track impressions (not clicks) for phrase and exact match terms; the only drawback is that you need to have a budget for Google adwords Google serch console: check the search analytics repot in google search console under search traffic > search analytics > queries, the check "impressions" checkbox; do this monthly Google keyword planner: run a search for your brand name on google keyword planner on a monthly basis; if brand name search is on an upward trend, then your marketing just might be working ALSO try to map publicity campaigns with brand name search; if you engaged group of influencers over specific month, you may want to backtrack on brand name search during the month of the campaign to see if there was any lift

Organic traffic metrics

Google search console metrics (should be tracked on a monthly basis)

Value per visit

Helps you understand the value of each and every visitor to your website; divided revenue of your site by the number of visitors over a given period of time; helpful in guiding decisions around advertising and calculating the return on your marketing investment

Discovery

How to analyze impressions

Consideration

How to analyze inbound traffic, including what they do on your site, how they interact with email and social media engagement

REtention

How to analyze repeat orders, customer lifetime value and purchase frequency

Advocacy

How to analyze word of mouth and referral marketing stats

Revenue

How to measure micro-conversions and analyze sales, transactions and average order value - tracking it to successful actions

Likes per post

Likes, thumbs ups, favories, or +1s; need to collate likes on each social media platform and divided it by the number of posts on the individual platform

Impressions

Number of times your ads were viewed

Ecommerce conversion rate

Number of visitors converted into buyers; evaluate conversion for your different advertising sources, email campaigns and promotions to understand what was most effective in driving sales so you can plan accordingly

Percentage of mobile visits

Percent of visits, revenue, etc. that are coming through mobile site

Bounce rate

Percentage of single page visits (or web sessions)

Net promoter score

Survey that measures how likely a customer is to recommend your brand to a friend; 9-10 = promoters; 7-8 = neutral, everyone else is a detractor

Subscriber growth rate

The growth rate of your email list; if you're not seeing growth here, explore ways to expand your audience via outlets like Pinterest, multimedia, targeted keywords or in-person events

Google search console

Total clicks and total impressions; look at total impressions metric on a monthly basis, because it gives you an idea of the number of times your website was served as a result on google's organic search result, serving as a good KPI for overall reach; if your reach far outweighs your traffic, it's time to think about revising your title structure to encourage more click through; i also track the "average position" metric on a monthly basis

Clicks

Total count of clicks from google search results pages (SERPs) to your website; track it alongside the impressions metric and compare with google analytics metrics such as sessions and unique page views; track on monthly basis

Average session duration

Total duration of all sessions (in seconds) / number of sessions; want to track this metric alongside bounce rate to understand how engaging your store is; also want to use segments such as new visitors vs. returning visitors

Youtube impression metrics

Views; applies to all other video hosting platforms like Facebook videos or Vimeo; ensure that you understand the time duration a video is watched in order to be classified as a view on across all patlforms; YouTube's video metrics classifies a video that has been watched for 30 seconds or more as a view, while Facebook classifies a video view as 3 seconds or more

Key question at consideration stage of the funnel

What portion of people that have come across our brand are engaging with our brand

TV advertising

Will need to negotiate on the basis of the "reach" metric (i.e., how many people are likely going to view your commercial); relevancy is JUST as important

Display impression share (google adwords)

Your impression share strictly for impressions generated through the Display network

New users

a visitor who did not have google analytics cookies they they hit the first page in the visit; if a visitor deletes their cookies and comes back to the site, the visitor will be counted as a new visitor

Online and offline impressions

all advertising platforms you utilize will provide metrics on impressions (or cost-per-impression), i.e., the number of times your ads are served to their audience

Product discovery analytics

answers how many people have come across our brand or the line of products we sell (helpful in understanding marketing effectiveness) - only USEFUL if your marketing tactics are targeting your target demo

Average CTR

average click through rate; click count divided by the impression count; use it to gauge how well your title tags and meta descriptions tags drive searches on Google to your site; significant discrepancy indicates the opportunity to optimize for click through; track on monthly basis

CPM (cost per 1000 impression)

average cost per 1000 impressions

Cost per 1000 reached

average cost to reach 1000 people

Frequency

average number of times each person saw your ad

Avg. position

average ranking of your website's URLs for the Google search queries; track on monthly basis

Order gap analysis

average time lapse between two purchases from a single customer; helps to inform email marketing automation efforts so that you automatically remind customers to repurchase; time between purchases will vary across retail verticals; calculated by dividing 365 by your purchase frequency metric; the output would be an average number of days between purchases

Average customer lifetime value

average total amount spent by each customer over their lifetime; key components include: 1) average order value 2) purchase frequency 3) time period (this is variable and dependent on your business) - average time period is around 3 years but should be assessed on a case by case basis

Onsite traffic metrics

can be found in google analytics; easiest way to establish measurement on your website; sessions in google analytics goes by visits in other platforms

Gross margin

difference between revenue and COGs

Average order size

divide revenue by number of transactions; in order to boost this, consider offering free shipping at a certain dollar amount or volume discounts

Analyze micro conversions

divide total number of specific micro conversions (goal completions in google analytics) by sessions and multiply that value by 100; this way, you know what kind of micro conversions to expect with varying volumes of traffic; also a leading indicator of cart abandonment on your site, which is a low hanging fruit for many online retailers

Unsubscribes

helps to calculate overall list growth rate; should also track unengaged subscribers alongside unscribes and consider removing them from your list

Cart abandonment rate

how many people came to your site and ordered versus how many bounced without making a purchase; then calculate cart abandonment;

ecommerce churn rate

if your LTV is low, it could be that many of your customers buy once and never return; this is measured by "churn," which is the percentage of your customers who do not come back to your site; the lower the churn, the better

Number of online transactions

important to track this metric in addition to overall revenue; helps you understand how customers interact with your online store

clicks per post

measures link click throughs from social media posts over a given period of time (typically over a month) and then divides it by number of published social media posts over the same time period

comments per post

mentions, comments to your social media posts; gauge of how much a community your brand is garnering on social media

email clickthrough rate

percentage of email recipients who clicked on links in emails; (total clicks OR unique clicks / number of delivered emails) * 100 --- NOTE this is not divided by number of opened emails but rather of all emails

open rate

percentage of email recipients who open a given email

Email bounce rate

percentage of undelivered emails from your total emails sent that could not be successfully delivered

email conversion rate

portion of email recipients that completed a purchase after clicking through links in your email campaigns; (number of sales from emails / number of total emails delivered) * 100

Repeat purchase rate

portion of repeat customers from your overall customer base; PRIMARY retention marketing metric; divided total number of customers that have purchased more than once by total number of customers

Ecommerce micro-conversions

pre-determined steps that typically occur before a sale; usually include email collection (via on-site subscription boxes of behavioral triggered pop ups) and ordering samples (particularly common with voluminous products such as furniture or flooring)

Purchase frequency

proportion of customers that have shopped more than once over a specified period of time; while the repeat purchase rate looks at repeat purchases over a lifetime, it is important to base the purchase frequency metric over a period of time, which will be typically 12 months

Email list growth rate

rate at which your email list is growing; calculated by your total number of new subscribers minus unsubscribers, divided by total number of email addresses on your list

Micro to macro conversion rate

relationship between micro conversions and macro conversions (sales / revenue)

More specific sales data

sales totals generated BY CHANNEL (e.g., search, social media channels, email, direct, referrals, TV), sales totals for each category in your product catalog, sales generated by each promo code

shares per post

shares, retweets, repins; indicative of the average number of times posts are shared over a given amount of time

Customer acquisition cost

should be studied BY CHANNEL; startup commerce businesses need a monthly CAC dashboard as a matter of survival and to wisely spend limited marketing budgets; should be measured in two ways 1) direct sales conversions: from a channel, i.e., based on a last (click) interaction 2) assisted conversions: based on a chain of multiple visits that eventually led to a sale

product and seller reviews

should be tracked and segmented monthly

Sales conversion rates

total number of sales divided by total number of sessions to you store; understanding this metric is critical to determining how much traffic is required to generate your target sales; set conversion rat by channel (e.g., adwords, SEO, Facebook, etc.); set conversion rate by category of products; set conversion rate by campaign

average order value (AOV)

total sales divided by number of transaction; might be worth understanding this metric in each category; monitoring this metric on a monthly basis will help you understand and even influence trends

Number of visits to sale

want to set a quarterly or biannual benchmark on how many visits it takes on average for new customers to make their first purchase

Search impression share (google adwords)

your impression share strictly for impressions generated through the search network