The Best KPI’s To Monitor on your eCommerce Site

Ecommerce is a numbers game. But, this can very easily turn things into a minefield of focusing on a number because it’s down, without realising it’s not a number that will have an impact and your focus should be elsewhere. Our aim for this piece, is to help eCommerce retailers focus their attention on the KPI’s that matter. The all important revenue drivers.

We’ve worked on eCommerce sites from both a development and a marketing perspective for over 15 years and we’re obsessed with split tests! We have our own eCommerce KPI dashboard for all of our clients that helps to grow their businesses, and it’s these KPI’s that drive success. So if your a retailer looking to scale, this blog post is for you. Let’s dive in to the important KPI’s.

Traffic

This seems a simple one but let’s dig a little deeper. It’s a no brainer that a site needs more traffic to drive more sales. But, it doesn’t need any old traffic, it needs good quality traffic that will convert. There’s no point throwing a load of mud at the wall hoping a bit of it will stick, as this approach will actually make your numbers worse.

Good quality traffic also needs to be cost effective and Cost Per Click (CPC) plays a massive part in this. We are constantly looking for how to reduce CPCs to ensure that the traffic we bring to your site comes in a cheaply as possible.

What’s important to note is that in order to scale traffic profitably you have to hit the other KPI targets. In a nutshell, hitting the other KPI targets, will allow you to scale traffic and market share. It’s that simple.

Add To Basket Rate %

You will notice that we don’t include Conversion Rate as one of the KPI’s – are we crazy! Well the conversion rate is represented by multiplying the Add to Basket % by the Basket to Order %. Breaking down the conversion rate into 2 numbers gives you so much more clarity.

The Add to Basket Rate is the best measure on the site as to how motivated visitors are to buy the products. A low add to basket % shows clearly that visitors just don’t desire and want what you have to offer. A huge amount of work we do is to raise this KPI – it’s critical – without optimising this you will never scale your revenue.

Website Speed & Capacity

We include this one, because it’s like insurance. What happens if all the customers come on one day? How close are you to the site slowing down to an unusable speed. How much capacity do you have in the tank. You need to have a safety factor here, so that when your marketing kicks in your website does not call in sick.

Lifetime Customer Value

You cannot see Lifetime Customer Value in Google Analytics and because its not there, a lot of retailers don’t track it. But you should be doing! It’s an absolute key metric for every retailer. If Lifetime Value is going up, then you are doing something right, if it’s going down then why? 101 marketing tells us that it’s 10 times easier to sell to an existing customer – yes it is – this KPI is like the turbo charger in ecommerce growth.

Growth Of 6 Month Customer Recruitment Year On Year

Everything could be going right on your store, customers buying more and more, conversion rates increasing. But is there a monster under the bed? Every time we have seen a retailer stalled in sales growth it has been because they forgot about this metric. Customers inevitably churn in any business – but you have to constantly renew fuel into the sale funnel.

Average Order Value

“What an Amazing Month we had!” – or was it? We can always bring sales forward with a promotion or sale, but how did it affect the long term average order value. We need to make sure that we are growing whilst not robbing Peter to pay Paul. What we want to see is average order value increasing alongside traffic and conversion rate growth. You have to bring them all to the party. The difference between a £36 average order value and a £38 one can mean a million pounds worth of revenue that year, so it pays to focus on this metric!

Basket To Order Rate

We know that we should be seeing around 40% – 50% basket to order rate. If it’s much lower it means that people are having second thoughts once they have added product to the basket. There’s so much you can do here. The flow of the purchase, the reasons to buy now rather than later, the ease of use on the checkout, the payment methods. Some of the easiest gains you have on your store sit right here. But! A caveat – don’t optimise this until your Add to Basket rate is optimised. Reason? Because with the Add To Basket % optimised, the flow of customers at the checkout step will be so much greater and you will be optimising a much bigger audience.

We hope our blog post gave you some valuable information. We talk more about the important KPI’s in our video

If you’re looking for help with your eCommerce site, we can start off with some consultancy to get your growth strategy in place, or we can help with everything from audit, to development, to marketing, to taking over your support contract. We aren’t like any other agency out there and we pride ourselves on being different. We’re a team of ex retailers, with a passion for business growth. That makes us the proactive partner that you never knew you needed so much until you work with us! Contact us for more information.

We’re so passionate about eCommerce we’ve even written a book. You can buy it on amazon or ask us for a free copy.