7 Key Performance Indicators for eCommerce You Should Be Tracking

A lot of online business owners might think that the only thing they need to worry about is keeping track of how many people are buying their products. And while that is certainly true, there are a number of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that you should keep your eye on in order to make sure you have your business running at full capacity.

There are several different ways to determine if your business is performing at optimal levels, but if you want a better understanding of areas that you can improve in, you will want to analyze the data for the following KPIs:

Site Traffic

This one is pretty straightforward, as it is a simple indicator of how many people are visiting your site on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. It can allow you determine which days customers are most likely to visit your site and analyze why certain days are more popular than others. Making sense of this data can allow you to develop marketing strategies that can help you boost your website’s traffic.

Average Time on Site

Examining this type of data will allow you to figure out whether or not your customers are actually engaged by the content on your website. If your customers are spending an average amount of time on each page of your website, it means they are fairly happy with both the content and how you have everything displayed.

But if the average time on spent on your site is fairly low, it might mean that your customers are having a hard time finding their way around site or, even worse, that they simply aren’t that interested in what you are offering! Studying this statistic can help you remedy both of those problems.

Exit Pages

This refers to when your customers are leaving your site. It can allow you to pinpoint exactly where your customers might lose interest or when they come across something that they don’t find satisfactory (like your current prices or how much you charge for shipping). This data can help you optimize your website in order to keep the attention of your customers and can also give you an idea of what type of changes you need to make to your current policies.

Referrals

Obviously you’ll want to know how your customers are visiting your site. Is it just good word of mouth or is it because they found it through a Google search? Examining the data for this RPI is an excellent way to see what type of marketing strategies bring in more customers, which can in turn allow you to focus on developing more engaging and effective marketing strategies in the future.

Conversion Rate

It’s one thing if people are visiting your website, it’s an entirely different thing if they are actually becoming your customers. Your conversion rate refers to the actual percentage rate of people who visit your site and become legitimate customers and clients. If the number isn’t to your liking, you should examine things like your call-to-actions, as well as whether or not you are effectively using A/B testing.

Return Rate

It’s always nice to sell something to someone, but it’s even nicer to have a customer become loyal to your brand. By examining your return rate, you can see how effective you are at retaining your current customers or if you are only successful at selling your services or products to a customer once. Similar to your conversion rate, if you aren’t happy with your current numbers, you’ll need to evaluate how you can actually keep customers coming back to your website to buy your products or services.

Average Order Value

Seeing how much your customers order can allow you to determine which items represent the most value to them. It can help you see which products to put on sale more often, as well as give you an idea of which products and services you need to offer discounts on. Knowing the average order value of your clients will give you a better understanding of their spending habits, which will in turn allow you to make better decisions that will positively influence their future spending habits.

This post originally appeared on AlexDesigns Blog, republished with permission from the author.

About the Author

Alex Harris is the Creative Director of AlexDesigns.com. As an interactive creative director leading a team of web designers, Alex Harris has been creating and testing landing pages for ecommerce web sites since 2004. Bryan Eisenberg has called Alex “one of our secret weapons” in helping increase clients’ conversion rates. Having produced more than a hundred ecommerce stores, Alex knows what it takes to increase online sales, generate more leads and make more money online. In 2014 he published “Boost E-commerce Sales and Make More Money: Three Hundred Tips to Increase Conversion Rates and Generate Leads.”