As an E-commerce store founder, you must be aware of the importance of setting sales and marketing goals to grow your business. However, to truly understand what’s working and identify areas for improvement, it’s essential to align your E-commerce KPIs and metrics with the customer journey.
By doing so, you’ll gain a better understanding of how your customers are interacting with your brand, and identify opportunities to improve their experience and drive revenue growth. In this blog, we’ll explore the E-commerce KPIs and metrics you should track for business success, aligning them with the customer journey. But let’s cover some basics first.
E-commerce KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are measurable values that indicate your progress towards specific business goals. It gives a comprehensive view of how your e-commerce business is performing.
For example, conversion rate or cart abandonment are classic examples of E-commerce KPIs. They are different from metrics, which highlight your progress towards specific business objectives. Number of visits, page views per session, bounce rate, etc., are all examples of metrics.
There are hundreds of different KPIs you could use to track your e-commerce business, but not all of them are equally important for your success. Hence, when choosing KPIs and metrics you should focus on the ones:
We have mapped the most important KPIs with the customer purchase journey to make things easier for you. Here are the metrics you should measure at each stage:
Let’s dig deeper into each stage and it’s corresponding metrics in the next section:
Generating brand awareness is crucial to attract visitors to your website. Even though it may appear to be a simple concept, without building awareness, your brand may remain undiscovered, and you may lose out on potential revenue. Here are the metrics you should track to measure your brand awareness efforts:
Impressions help you measure the number of times your ad or content is displayed to someone on any platform such as third-party sites, search results, or social media platforms, regardless of whether the viewer clicks on it or not.
Even though impressions are not a direct measure of engagement or conversions, the metric provides valuable insight into how many people are potentially exposed to your brand, making it a useful metric for evaluating the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.
Reach is the number of unique individuals who viewed your product or visited your online store during a specific period of time. Reach is a crucial metric for e-commerce businesses because it provides insights into how many potential customers have been exposed to your brand, products, or services.
Don’t get confused between reach and impressions. Reach focuses on the unique individuals who have viewed your content, and impressions refer to the total number of times your content is displayed to customers, including multiple views by the same user. For example, if a person views a product page on your website ten times, this will be counted as ten impressions but only one reach.
To improve your marketing campaigns’ reach, ensure your brand voice is defined and messaging resonates with your audience.
Engagement shows how many viewers interacted with your content. It may include both acquisition-related metrics, such as CTC (click-through rate), and non-acquisition-related metrics, such as likes, comments, and shares.
To gauge engagement on your e-commerce site, keep a close eye on the average session duration and bounce rate. Average session duration is the average amount of time a user spends on a particular channel. A high average session duration indicates higher engagement with a channel. Bounce rate is the percentage of users who visited your website but left after viewing a single page. A high bounce indicates lower engagement.
There are multiple ways by which you can reach your potential customers. It could be emails, paid media, and social media, to name a few. You must use all these channels to get your potential customers to consider your products. The following metrics determine whether you were successful in enticing customers to visit your website or not.
Organic acquisition traffic measures the number of visitors reaching your site organically. These visitors come from channels like search engines, social media, and even blogging sites. The catch here is that these visitors reach your website through their own research and not explicit paid promotions or advertising. This metric helps you gain insights about your SEO strategy, social media presence, and the overall results of your content marketing efforts—allowing you to improve and optimize these strategies accordingly.
In simple terms, this is the percentage of email subscribers who received your email, opened it, and clicked through to your site. It is a valuable indicator of the effectiveness of email marketing campaigns. To improve email CTR, create visually appealing and well-designed emails, including mobile-friendly design, clear and compelling calls-to-action, and engaging subject lines that encourage recipients to open the email and explore the content.
Cost per acquisition measures the total cost of acquiring a customer. It is an important metric to measure because it points to the profitability of your marketing efforts.
Cost per acquisition should always be measured in the context of AOV (average order value). For example, having a CAC of Rs 150 and an AOV of Rs 6,000 is a good sign for business, whereas a CAC of Rs 40 and an AOV of Rs 60 means the business is not sustainable.
E-commerce sales on social media is expected to reach $474 billion by 2024, hence it’s important to have a strong social media presence for D2C brands. To measure the effectiveness of your social media presence, keep track of likes, shares, clicks and comments on posts.
Now that you have visitors to your site, measuring how well you convert them into paying customers is important. Our goal here is to identify transactional funnel drop-offs and prevent them. These metrics can help you do just that.
It is the percentage of visitors who leave a website after viewing only one page. Measuring bounce rate is important because it shows how relevant and engaging your content is. For instance, a high bounce rate indicates that your visitors are not finding what they are looking for. It could be either due to irrelevant content or that your website is difficult to navigate.
Shopping cart abandonment rate is the percentage of visitors who add items to their cart but do not complete the purchase.
Abandonment rate could indicate that the visitors are experiencing issues with the shopping cart itself, such as a confusing layout or a lack of clear CTA. It could also mean issues with the checkout process, preventing customers from completing the order. We suggest setting up a cart abandonment email sequence to convert these lost sales.
Average Order Value or AOV measures the average value of each order placed by a customer. It is calculated by dividing the total revenue by the number of orders. Measuring AOV is important as it helps in understanding the buying patterns and preferences of your customers. This, in turn, will help in identifying and fine-tuning upselling or cross-selling strategies to increase revenue.
The sales conversion rate is the total number of sales divided by the total number of sessions. It helps in determining how much traffic is needed to achieve your target sales. However, this is a granular metric and you need to analyze it at micro levels. You can dissect it by channel, category of products, campaign, etc.
Most D2C brands forget to measure metrics related to product delivery, which can negatively impact their customer experience and might lead to loss of repeat customers. To ensure that your logistics are fool-proof, we suggest keeping track of your Delivery TAT and Return & Refund TATs.
Retaining an existing customer is five times cheaper than acquiring a new customer. Also, repeat customers tend to spend more and refer others. Here are the metrics you should track to know how well your brand is retaining customers:
Now that you have acquired, converted, and retained customers, it’s time to convert them as your brand ambassadors. The customer advocacy metrics quantify the degree to which your customers support and promote your brand and products to their friends and family. Here are a few metrics you should consider tracking:
NPS measures customer satisfaction and loyalty and is a widely used metric for assessing customer advocacy. It asks customers to rate on a scale of 0 to 10 how likely they are to recommend your brand to others. Customers who score 9 or 10 are considered promoters, while those who score six or below are considered detractors. You can calculate NPS Score by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters.
It is the percentage of customers who refer new customers to your business. When you measure customer referral rate, you will understand the effectiveness of your referral marketing efforts. In addition, it will help you identify areas where you can improve your referral programs, such as by offering better referral incentives or providing an easy way for customers to refer others.
Email marketing is one of the most promising marketing channels today. As a result, it becomes important to measure the subscription rate or the percentage of your visitors who opted-in for your email lists. When the subscription rate is high, it shows that customers find your products promising and want to keep purchasing from you.
Lastly, you should also monitor customer reviews and ratings to ensure that you are providing exceptional customer service.
Apart from the above metrics, E-commerce businesses should also track last-mile delivery and product-related metrics to ensure they can optimize logistic services and make the right decisions about their product.
Last-mile delivery metrics are a set of KPIs used to assess the efficiency and effectiveness of the final stages of your delivery process. It mainly involves the delivery of the product to your customer. This stage is often referred to as the “last mile” because it is the final step in the delivery chain and significantly impacts the customer experience. Here are some of the metrics that fall under the last-mile delivery segment:
With the increasing competition in the direct-to-consumer (D2C) space, it’s essential to continually monitor your products’ performance and make data-driven decisions to stay ahead of the curve.
Some of the essential product metrics that you should monitor are:
In addition to these quantitative metrics, you should collect qualitative feedback from your customers through surveys, focus groups, or other feedback channels. The feedback can help you understand your customers’ preferences, pain points, and product expectations, which can guide your product development and marketing efforts.
Finally, it’s also essential to closely monitor your competitors and their product offerings. Analyzing their best-selling products and identifying any emerging trends in your industry can help you stay ahead of the curve.
Start by creating an index that summarizes your performance across specific marketing channels. For instance, let’s say you have selected five metrics which performed at:
The index will be calculated as
(2*0.8 + 1*0.6 + 2*1)/5 = 0.84 or 84%
Now you need to focus on how to improve this index. Rather than fixing the lowest performing metrics, identify which of those metrics is most important for your business growth at the time and focus on that.
We know that improving these metrics can be a lot of work and might seem overwhelming, especially if you’re already juggling multiple aspects of your E-commerce business. That’s where ANS Commerce comes in.
As a Flipkart group company, we are India’s #1 Full Stack E-commerce Growth Partner, trusted by over 200+ brands. We offer end-to-end E-commerce services, from creating your online store to running profitable performance marketing campaigns, managing marketplaces, order fulfillment, and warehousing – all tailored to supercharge your brand’s growth.
Want to know how we can scale your E-commerce business? Book a free consulting session with our experts today!
