Metrics that Matter: Advertising, Storefront and Shipping

The data provided to brands by eCommerce is used to drive sales, reach new audiences, and upsell like crazy. 

With eCommerce becoming old hat for most brands at this point, it’s more important than ever that every eCommerce brand should be making use of key metrics in three areas to truly be successful: advertising, storefront, and shipping. 

Emma Miller, the Senior Editor at Bizzmark, refers to metrics as the “one thing that can make or break your online presence.” She explains that setting measurable goals, choosing the right metrics to track, and continuously analyzing your online performance is imperative if you want to succeed in the competitive online market.

 

Make a Connection: Advertising Metrics

There are all sorts of metrics available to eCommerce brands, and the amount of data available can be overwhelming. In the marketing arena, we believe these five metrics are most important.

• Marketing Attribution. This metric helps you determine which of your marketing efforts are most effective. Are paid efforts leading to more purchases than organic efforts? Are you getting more click-through traffic from mobile sources or desktop? Knowing where customers are coming from can help you streamline the process and save money.
• Click-through Rate. This metric measures the number of people that click a link leading to your site. This metric can help determine if your page views originate from emails, social media campaigns, or elsewhere. This knowledge can help determine what content customers like most and what platforms are most important.
• Returning Visitors. This metric measures how often visitors return to your site. You can determine what pages of your site they’re returning to and for how long they remain on these pages. This can help in measuring customer loyalty and satisfaction as well as the usefulness of your site. 
• Funnel Abandonment. This term refers to how far down the marketing funnel your customers get before cutting ties. Do customers unsubscribe from email lists before visiting your website? Or lose interest upon reaching a specialized landing page? This feedback can help streamline your marketing efforts to catch potential customers before they bail.
• Brand awareness. This metric is used to convey how your brand is performing on social media and branded search. It helps measure the results or effects of social listening, and can encompass more than one measurement per platform, including everything from Twitter followers and mentions to searches for your brand to Facebook fans. 

 

Sell Your Brand: Storefront Metrics

Marketing and sales often mix, so many sales metrics are closely intertwined with or bleed over from marketing metrics. And while the conversion rate remains important, these metrics go far beyond that.

 

• Bounce Rate. Bounce rate refers to the number of visitors to your site that doesn’t make it past the page they first arrived to. This important metric can speak to a problem with your landing page or with the expectations set by the source of the click.

• Customer Retention. This metric tracks how many customers become repeat customers. The more customers return, the less money you’ll have to spend on acquiring new ones. Repeat customers also signify high customer satisfaction.

• Customer Lifetime Value. LTV is essentially a quantitative measure of customer satisfaction. It measures the average value of a single customer over their entire lifetime with your brand. This metric can help you determine if it is more important that you focus on retaining customers than finding new ones.
• Pageviews. Pageviews measure the number of pages viewed by your audience each time they visit your site. This metric can help determine how good your site is engaging customers with your content. This metric can be improved with high-quality content, internal linking, and simplified navigation. 
• Cart Abandonment. Cart abandonment is the rate at which customers add something to their cart without buying it. Knowing where and why the process is abandoned can help you decrease this rate and increase true sales.

 

Send it Home: Shipping Metrics

Your brand’s relationship with a customer doesn’t end once they’ve made a purchase, especially if you want them to come again. Keep track of these metrics to ensure that customer satisfaction stays high even after they’ve placed an order.

 

• Inventory Accuracy. Inventory accuracy is a metric that measures how close the electronic record of your inventory is to the true state of your material inventory and what you have available. Problems with an electronic record not matching up with the true inventory can result in disappointed customers who aren’t likely to come back again.

• On-time Delivery. How often items are delivered on time is another metric that helps determine if you’re keeping your promises to customers. Customers must be able to trust that they’ll receive their products in a timely manner. Continuously keeping these promises builds trust with your customers.

• Return Rate. It’s also important to keep track of the rate at which products are returned. This is another good way to keep tabs on how satisfied your customers are. A high return rate means that you’re losing money and customers. Keeping track of which items are returned most frequently and why can lead you to problem areas that require attention.

 

Bonus: Net Promoter Score

NPS, or Net Promoter Score, is basically your customer base’s willingness to promote your product on their own. It is a result of positive customer experience. It is a good final indicator of overall success since it takes into account the effectiveness of your marketing, storefront engagement, shipping satisfaction, and more.

Multichannel: Bringing Marketing, Storefront and Fulfillment Together 

With multichannel eCommerce, the different moving parts of your brand are intertwined — marketing with sales, sales with fulfillment, fulfillment with marketing. Understanding how they’re all related is the first step toward success. 

To understand this, you’ll need two things: a short list of critical KPIs for your eCommerce brand and a way to visualize how these metrics interplay. 

However, these metrics are a lot to keep track of. Especially amongst different platforms, how can you keep all this data straight?

You can use tools such as a profit analytics dashboard to bring together the most relevant metrics for each area. Monitoring your profit and marketing performance in eCommerce is vital to success. It shouldn’t be hard — and a single dashboard for all your metrics makes it easier.

Author Bio:

Brooklin writes on all things eCommerce for OrderMetrics. He is a professional B2B and SaaS writer with an affinity for GIFs.

Guest

July 30, 2019

Pauline's passions lie in eCommerce and supporting individuals in their online selling endeavors. Currently, as a frequent contributor to the BQool Blog, she channels her passions into creating informative contents that break down the complex challenges Amazon sellers face on a daily basis.