5 Marketing Metrics Every Ecommerce Store Should Be Aware Of
For any ecommerce business, understanding your store’s metrics is an effective way to gauge performance, make informed changes, and improve engagement over time.
But which metrics should you be monitoring? And how?
In this piece, we’ll outline 5 of the most important metrics for ecommerce website owners to be aware of. This is based on our extensive experience with ecommerce SEO.
1. Conversion Rate
What it is: conversion rate is the ratio between the number of people who visit your site, and the number who perform a particular action. In the context of ecommerce this is likely to be making a purchase, signing up to receive updates, or some other commercially-oriented action.
Why it matters: this metric is directly tied to revenue and gives good insights into visibility and the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.
How to track it: you need to know how many visitors your site is getting and how many are completing the desired action(s). Google Analytics offers sophisticated goal tracking, and is our recommended tool for tracking ecommerce conversion rates.
2. Average Order Value (AOV)
What it is: this is the average amount spent by customers on your website per transaction. To calculate it, divide total revenue by the number of orders taken over a specific period.
Why it matters: this metric helps in understanding customer purchasing behaviour and can guide strategies to upsell, cross-sell, or optimise pricing.
How to track it: you can calculate AOV using ecommerce analytics tools. Monitoring AOV over time and by product category lets you find opportunities to increase it.
3. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
What it is: this is the total revenue you can expect from a customer throughout their relationship with your business. It accounts for their purchase frequency, their average order value, and their customer lifespan.
Why it matters: this metric helps you understand the long-term value of your customers and the ROI from your marketing efforts.
How to track it: use customer purchase data from your ecommerce platform or CRM. Segment them out by lifetime value to tailor your marketing strategies: you could offer loyalty programs or personalised incentives to high-value customers, for example.
4. Cart Abandonment Rate
What it is: this is the percentage of potential customers who leave your site with items still in their cart. To calculate it, divide the number of completed purchases by the number of carts created and subtract the result from 100%.
Why it matters: high abandonment can highlight issues with your store’s checkout process, or other factors like unexpected costs or lack of trust. Reducing cart abandonment can significantly boost conversion rates and revenue.
How to track it: use tools like Google Analytics or your ecommerce platform’s built-in analytics, then use these insights to identify drop-off points. Depending on behaviour, consider testing changes like simplified checkout, clear shipping information, and trust badges to reduce abandonment.
5. Traffic Sources
What it is: the sources of your website traffic: a simple but very insightful source of data.
Why it matters: understanding whether traffic is coming from organic search, paid ads, social media, direct visits, or other sources lets you optimise marketing spend to focus on channels that drive the most value.
How to track it: again, Google Analytics is a good tool for this. It has the option to break down traffic by source and analyse the conversion rates for each.
Making Informed Ecommerce Decisions
Running an ecommerce store is tricky business, as you’re probably already aware. Building sophisticated data streams and using them to evaluate your strategy and make ongoing changes paves the way for success.
