7 Most Important Ecommerce Metrics To Monitor For Growth

Configuring analytics properly for an ecommerce website can be a daunting task, especially in comparison to how easy an ecommerce site is to set up. But that’s no excuse to put off configuring proper analytics. We all know the adage, “what we can measure, we can manage”, but beyond being able to manage the growth and scalability of your ecommerce website, configuring proper analytics provides a whole host of other benefits —

Additional Benefits of Ecommerce Tracking

Configure once and done

Time is a valuable asset, and taking the time to set up analytics for your ecommerce website will not yield an immediate ROI like being active on social media or writing good content would. But rest assured that this is one of those time investments that you or someone on your team needs to make. The sooner these analytics are set up, the quicker you will get actionable data to help improve your business with. Once it’s up-and-running, the time to actually go in and review the data is minimal, so get over that initial hump sooner rather than later — just do it!

Easier to track employees and campaigns properly

Ecommerce analytics provides two benefits when it comes to scaling your team. First, having analytics in place prior to scaling your team allows you to understand where your website produces the most profits and therefore would theoretically bring in the most money if there was more of a team to focus on that area. Whether that focus is adding new products or creating new content, with proper analytics you would know where it makes most sense to grow your team. The second benefit is that once you do grow your team, you already have a baseline on what to expect and can quantitatively review their work, keeping everyone accountable.

Know what your customers care about

When you have proper ecommerce analytics in place, you can see things like which pages customers spend most time on, which pages customers engage with most, and which search terms customers use most to land on your website. With this information, you can get inside the head of your customer and understand what they want, giving you the power to add more products they want, improve the copy on your pages to improve conversion rates, and focus your inbound marketing methods on the right things. All of this means extra money on the bottom line.

Easier to bring on investors or exit completely

If you ever want to bring on investors or even sell your ecommerce website, you’ll need data to back up your valuation. The longer track record of data you have, the stronger argument you can make to demand a higher multiple, especially if you start early with small numbers and show impressive growth. You don’t want to be scrambling to get your data presentable when the time comes, so if either of these scenarios are conceivable, you should really prioritize getting proper analytics tracking up and maintain it properly.

Simply dropping your Google Analytics pixel on your website is not enough to properly track what needs to be tracked — you need to configure a few settings first, and then know what metrics are most important to track —

Ecommerce Analytics Metrics to Track

First, block inside IP addresses

Before doing anything, there’s one big step you can take to drastically improve the accuracy of your data — blocking the IP addresses of you and your entire team so that their behavior on your website does not skew the data, since that traffic is clearly not from potential customers. You’ll want to do this with all analytical software, from Google Analytics to any split testing software. To do this in Google Analytics, you’ll want to go to Admin > View > Filters, and then create a new filter that excludes traffic from specific IP addresses. You can do the same in the Optimizely settings. To get your IP address, just go to WhatsMyIP.org.

Then, set goals

Google Analytics has a specific Ecommerce goal tracking feature, which you’ll want to utilize over, or at least in conjunction with normal goals. Depending on what platform your website is running on will determine the actual configuration process. A simple Google search will certainly guide you in the right direction though. Above normal ecommerce metrics, such as revenue and conversion rate, you can also utilize the Goals or OnEvent features in Google Analytics if you want to track things like external link clicks, pageview time or custom funnel metrics.

Metric #1 — New Visitors %

Google Analytics > Audience > Overview

Assuming you have other basic ecommerce infrastructure up to convert future sales from current web visitors through drip email campaigns and Facebook retargeting, then tracking the number of new visitors to your site is very important — driving this number up means more people will be familiar with your brand, and if they don’t purchase on their first visit they will be entered into other funnels that will hopefully secure a profitable sale from them in the future. But if this metric isn’t going up consistently, your message is being sent to the same people over and over again and not fostering true growth.

Metric #2 — SEO Queries

Google Analytics > Acquisition > Search Engine Optimization > Queries

SEO is one of the best investments for an ecommerce site, as it can provide a steady stream of free targeted traffic of new visitors if executed correctly. You can also target people in different points of their purchasing decision with various targeted content, such as people who are still comparison shopping, people who are looking for specific features, and people who are ready to buy right now. With strong keyword research, you will know which keywords and phrases are most lucrative, but sometimes you might miss or underestimate a few. By seeing how your site actually performs in the search engines, you can come up with better, more targeted content to improve those metrics even further. By tracking impressions, average position and CTR for each term in the search engines, it also gives you a way to track the performance of your page title tags and meta description tags in terms of improving search engine rankings and CTR performance.

Metric #3 — Overall Pageview %

Google Analytics > Behavior > Overview

By seeing which pages on your website are most viewed, you’re essentially given a blueprint of which pages would yield the largest return if you split test and optimized them to push more sales through your funnel. If for whatever reason most of your visited pages are not even in your funnel, you know you need to rethink how to more effectively push people into your funnel in the first place.

Metric #4 — Landing Page Pageview %

Google Analytics > Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages

This metric could be skewed by any inbound marketing campaigns you’re running. But if you notice pages here that you are not actively sending people to, this provides another good blueprint of pages that would yield a high return if optimized to better facilitate traffic through your sales funnel. Here, it’s useful to look at bounce rate and try to manage that lower, as well as looking at % of viewers entering your funnel from this page, and trying to raise it.

Metric #5 — Conversion rates of specific pages

Google Analytics Funnel, Google Analytics Ecommerce Tracking or Split Testing

Sometimes some of your inner pages, like blog posts, are much more effective at convincing a visitor to purchase your products, but if you’re only tracking the conversion rates of your product pages or landing pages, you can’t differentiate between these pages that feed into them. Once you understand which inner pages perform best, you can then direct people to land on these profitable pages of your website during your inbound marketing and social media campaigns.

Metric #6 — Add to Cart %

Google Analytics or Split Testing Software

If you’re using product pages, you need to be tracking what percentage of visitors of those pages actually add the product to the cart. If you’re using a one-page website, you need to be tracking the percentage of people who click the “Buy Now” button. The best way to do this is to split test these pages in order to maximize this metric. By testing different product names, product prices, product descriptions or images, you can get a great sense of what your customers really want, and tailor all marketing campaigns accordingly.

Metric #7 — Profit Margin

Scaling an ecommerce business is never an accident — it’s always a coordinated, deliberate outcome. It’s also hardly ever free, whether that means growing your team, your ad budget or your content marketing efforts. But in order to intelligently allocate a budget to scale, you need to know how much you can spend for a given number of web visitors. In order to get this number, you need to know how much profit you earn from each sale, down to the penny. Once you have this number, everything else becomes easier.

There you have it — the reasons you need to have analytics in place on your ecommerce website, as well as 7 important metrics to track. Also, here’s my 9 favorite A/B split tests for you to use to kick off your testing. Any metrics that you track that are not on here? Share them in the comments below!