E-commerce Metrics you should track to boost sales
It takes both time and effort to build a successful online business. From optimizing your site for search engines, cultivating a strong social media presence to launching email marketing campaigns, there are multiple steps you need to follow to start your e-commerce store on the right foot. While all these strategies are crucial for bringing in sales, you also need to track data to measure the success of all these efforts in increasing conversions from your online store.
Collecting and assessing e-commerce metrics will help you make informed decisions on the strategies to use and those to discard to help your e-commerce store grow.
However, not all e-commerce metrics will have an impact on the desired goals of your e-commerce site. Here are the metrics you should track;
1. Website traffic. For your online store to succeed, consumers need to be aware of the existence of your online store. Keeping track of the number of people visiting your site will provide you with valuable insights about your site visitors, such as their demographic and source of traffic. Your web users can find your e-commerce site either directly, through a referral from other sites that link to you, or organic traffic from search engines.Knowingwhere your traffic is from will help you focus on specific channels or online strategies to market your brand for maximum returns. Understanding the demographic of your audience will also help you tailor your site to meet the needs of different target market segments.
2. SEO.Search Engine Optimization (SEO) consists of all the on-page and off-page factors that work together to improve your site’s rankings in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). When done right, your search engine rankings will improve, and your website’s traffic will increase. Tracking SEO metrics- such as keywords, backlinks, and page speed will help to evaluate the strategies that should be tweaked to increase conversions.
3. Conversion rate. The goal of your e-commerce site is to drive sales from your online store. A conversion occurs when a visitor to your site completes an action you’ve prompted them to do, which can be anything from purchasing a product, or signing up for a newsletter. By assessing conversions, you will see if your marketing strategies are effective in bringing people into the conversion funnel and whether your customers are completing a full customer journey. A good understanding of your conversion rate helps you implement Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) to make positive changes for your e-commerce site.
4. Email Marketing. Emails are a powerful online marketing tool for businesses, which provide a lot of trackable data to measure the success of your communication with your customers. The click-through rate of your emails, which is the percentage of email subscribers who receive an email, open it and click on a link to your website, gives valuable information to help measure the success of your email marketing campaigns. You can employ strategies to improve the click-through rate by creating well-designed emails with a clear call-to-action (CTA) to arouse the interest of your customers.
5. Shopping cart abandonment rate. This metric shows how many visitors landed directly on a product page and abandoned it without completing a purchase. A high cart abandonment could pinpoint issues in the checkout process or poor site navigation, which could lead to web users not finding what they are looking for in the product pages.
Starting an online store is now easier as there are a lot of dedicated tools and solutions to make it happen. However, it takes a lot of work to stand out from the competition and ensure your e-commerce site reaches its full potential. Take advantage of the numerous analytics tools available online to measure data such as page views, user behaviour, conversions, and more for insights on how to improve your e-commerce site. Knowing the most important metrics for an e-commerce site is useful for developing an effective analytics plan that is relevant to the online goals of your website.
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