Metrics to Track on an E-commerce Site

At Adficient we’re adamant about reporting. How else can you measure success unless you’re tracking important factors on the site? Determining which factors to track can be difficult for some businesses, especially if you’re hiring a company to increase these metrics. The following list of metrics are some of the most important to e-commerce websites. Each one plays into the other and has a online business grows these metrics should grow as well.

Social Media Presence

Measuring your social media presence is pretty straight-forward. How many new followers have you gained since focusing on social media? Now keep in mind by just increasing your followers this doesn’t mean the business is doing great. It does give a good idea of how many new users are willing to follow information provided by your company.

Let’s not stop with followers though. How are these new followers engaging with the brand? Sure you can ‘build’ new followers, but unless they are engaging they are not helpful for you. These new followers should be liking, sharing, and asking questions through social media. As you share on social media traffic from these sources should be increasing as well. As traffic increases, as does conversions, followed by revenue. Followers are great, engaging followers lead to purchases.

Another metric that’s closely related to social media followers is newsletter subscribers. These are completely different from social media followers, however do represent a new group of people who are following news from the site. Although you may share an article or item on social media daily, once a week you may share a newsletter that has multiple blog posts and items. By always increasing your email list this shows users that are visiting the site are interested in what you’re offering. The more subscribers, the more users to reach when a newsletter is sent out.

Users to the Site

When talking with a new client all have some goals for their site. These goals may be more leads, more phone calls, more foot traffic, but one thing is constant, they all want more users to the site. Users can come to the site from many different sources, the following are some of the most common;

Direct – These are users who are typing the site’s URL directly into their browser. These are typically returning users since they know the URL.

Organic Search – Users coming from organic search found the website or page through a search from a search engine. As rankings change, the number of organic search users will change as well.

Referral – When a user clicks a link, banner, or image, anything that leads a user to your site, is considered referral traffic. The placement of specific links will yield higher referral traffic.

Paid Search – Using AdWords or Bing Ads, traffic from these sources will show under this section. Keep in mind if you’re paying for users to click on the site these users should have higher engagement, such as time on site and most importantly conversions.

Social – Posting articles, items, or deals to social media will track all users who click something that brings them to your site. This also includes and URLs you have placed in descriptions and titles.

Email – You built a newsletter subscription list and have been emailing the users. How do you track them? Well if they are clicking from an email source it will show under this channel.

As the business grows users will continue to come from many different sources. With a well planned SEO campaign your organic traffic will continue to grow as rankings to the site change. A growing email list will help increase the number of users who are coming from the email channels. In an ideal situation traffic from all sources will steadily increase.

Conversion Rate

It’s all great to have tons of new users coming to the site, but if they aren’t converting then what’s the point? A conversion can be a number of different things, all depending on what the site is offering. For some this may be purchasing an item, filling out a form, or subscribing to a newsletter.

On average, depending on your industry, a typical conversion rate is around 2%. As you monitor your conversion rate you can get a good understanding of what pages are converting best. There’s many ways to alter your conversion rate and A/B testing on a landing page is the most successful way. By making minor changes on these pages, such as moving the call to action or even changing the color of some features can influence how users engage on the page.

Testing isn’t just for landing pages. Throughout the checkout process there’s many ways to increase users getting to the ‘thank you’ page. Offering free shipping can entice a customer to choose your product over another. By limiting the amount of pages or steps throughout the checkout process can also help get users through the checkout faster.

More information on how to increase conversion rate.

Referring Domains

Referring domains are defined by the number of domains that are pointing back to your site. A truly well established SEO campaign will have this number increasing consistently over time. Why are referring domains important? Referring domains are essentially votes for your site. The more, high quality, votes you have to your site the better search engines will rank your site. There are a number of tools available around the web that can help track referring domains. One of the best sources is Google itself. Google Search Console, previously known as Webmaster Tools, has the option to review all links to the site. Monitor the number of domains pointing to the site and make sure the number is always growing.

Revenue

Every business owner understands that increasing revenue is one of the most important parts of a business. With proper analytics setup and conversions being tracked, analytics can easily help show what channels are bringing the most revenue. As you track the progress of your digital marketing campaigns you will quickly find out which channels are performing best. With users to the site increasing, conversion rates increasing, revenue will follow suit.

Business Reviews

Reviews of your business have an indirect influence on the business. There’s been hundreds of surveys on how online reviews affect how users interact with a business. For instance, 54% of users who read a positive online review will visit the website. As a business grows and provides both excellent products/services and customer service reviews to the site will continue to come in. Monitor these reviews, even if you receive a poor review there’s ways to work with the customer to get the issue resolved.