The 11 eCommerce Metrics We Track To Improve Client Performance 

When it comes to growing your eCommerce business, you need to know how you are performing at all times. This means, regularly monitoring your eCommerce metrics and KPIs in order to better understand your customer’s behaviors and product performance. 

Using eCommerce analytics, you can dig deeper into your data and generate insights to help guide future strategies and adjust current campaigns to maximize sales and profitability. Taking this data-driven approach to growth will give you a better understanding of the marketing efforts that are driving results for your business and the ones that are not. 

But, when you are working across various platforms, how do you know which metrics you should be tracking and what they mean for business growth?

In this article, we at Making Noyze will help you better understand your eCommerce data. To do this, we will highlight the top eCommerce metrics we track for our clients, how often we track performance, and lastly how we visualize and present our results. 

What Are eCommerce Metrics and KPIs? 

Metrics and KPIs are terms that are often used interchangeably. Even though they both provide a qualitative measurement of performance, they do have different purposes. 

eCommerce metrics are used to monitor the progress of a company’s processes and actions. Even though they are not key indicators of success, they can be used to provide more context into products, customers, services, engagement, and more. 

While eCommerce KPIs measure a business’s progress toward its goals. KPIs will help you better understand how effective your strategies are at delivering results. Companies use KPIs to influence decision-making and shape future strategies. 

In short, eCommerce metrics will help you gauge the progress of your activities, while eCommerce KPIs will determine the effectiveness of your strategies. 

Since all KPIs are metrics but not all metrics are KPIs, here are a few questions you can ask yourself to help you determine your performance indicators:

• What are we looking to achieve right now?
• What is the number that will tell us whether we are getting closer to achieving our goal? 
• What will reaching this goal mean and what will it allow us to do next?

 

The Top 11 eCommerce Metrics We Track and Why

From Instagram to Shopify, eCommerce businesses rely on multiple platforms to execute an effective marketing strategy. Because of this countless hours are wasted trying to make sense of performance. 

Trust me… we know! 

From the experience of owning three of our own eCommerce brands, we understand how overwhelming data analytics can be to new eCommerce businesses. 

That is why Making Noyze has partnered with Databox. Databox is a reporting software that allowed us to simplify our eCommerce data through easy-to-understand data visualizations.  By connecting all of our platforms to this one tool, we have can create a dashboard to visualize and monitor performance from one central place. Here is an example of the dashboard we use for our clients. 

We use this dashboard to visualize the performance of 11 metrics across platforms like Shopify, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Klaviyo, Facebook, and Instagram. 

Let’s take a look at each of these metrics in a little more detail:

Total Sales

Total Sales will look at the number of sales made during the specified time period. Expressed as revenue, this metric is used to gauge the performance of an online store. 

Why is this important? Tracking total sales will help us better understand how the business is growing. To grow profitability, you need to be able to attain a sustainable level of growth both in the short and long term. 

Additionally, splitting this metric into new vs returning sales will help us determine if we should focus our resources on acquisition or retention strategies. As an example, if we notice that returning sales are 15% lower than in the previous period, we would shift our resources to focus on retention. 

Spend

Spend will measure the amount of money spent on paid campaigns during a specified time period. In this dashboard, we are monitoring spend across Facebook Ads and Google Ads. 

Why is this important? Tracking how much we are spending across our paid advertising channels helps us control our budget. 

It also helps us determine how much we should invest in each channel. As an example, if we notice that spend for Facebook Ads has increased and conversions have decreased, we may choose to invest more of our budget into the Google Ads campaigns. 

ROAS

Return On Ad Spend highlights the amount of revenue generated for every dollar spent on paid advertising. 

Why is this important? Because ROAS relates to revenue, tracking this metric is key to determining the success of our paid advertising strategies. 

Monitoring ROAS for Facebook Ads and Google Ads helps us identify the platform that has been the most cost-effective and should therefore continue to receive marketing budget. Lastly, to complement our ROAS analysis we can compare this metric against CPC to better understand the costs that are influencing the amount of revenue generated. 

Average Order Size 

As the name suggests average order size measures the average amount each customer spends when making a purchase on your website. 

Why is this important? Regularly tracking this metric helps us understand how our marketing efforts are contributing to purchases. Additionally, average order size can also provide insights into pricing strategies and customer behavior. 

Abandoned Cart Rate 

Abandoned cart rate is used to highlight the percentage of customers who add items to their online shopping cart and then leave without completing a purchase. 

Why is this important? There are various factors that can influence someone’s checkout experience. Monitoring this metric allows us to determine how intuitive and trustworthy our checkout process feels to customers. 

As an example, an increase in the abandoned cart rate would compel us to investigate the checkout process to try and identify any hiccups that might have prevented people from completing the purchase. 

Is the checkout process too long? Are we asking customers to create an account? Are the shipping costs too high? 

These are only a few of the questions we could answer by investigating this increase further! 

CPC

Also known as cost per click, this metric measures the average amount of money you pay for one click on your ad.

Why is this important? Since this metric directly impacts ROAS, tracking CPC is an important part of managing advertising costs. If we noticed our CPC has increased, we would need to review our keywords and ads to ensure it is relevant to the audience we are targeting.

 

Subscribed To Lists 

Subscribed to lists will measure the number of leads generated during a specified time period. 

Why is this important? In order to grow sales, you need more customers. Tracking this metric helps us understand the number of people who have expressed interest in the brand. This is important because it allows us to nurture potential customers down the funnel, pushing them closer to making a purchase. 

Email Open Rate 

Open rate is used to monitor the percentage of email subscribers who open your email compared to the number of emails sent.

Why is this important? Monitoring email open rate helps us understand the performance of our email campaigns. More specifically, open rate is a measurement that helps gauge the quality of our contact list, subject line, and email frequency. 

Email CTR 

Click through rate will measure the percentage of people who click on a link or CTA in your email, in relation to the number of emails that were delivered.

Why is this important? In short, CTR translates to engagement. 

Creating engaging content is not only about getting subscribers to open your email, but it’s also about enticing your audience to take action. CTR will let us measure just that! 

Social Reach 

Reach is used to measure the number of people who see content from or about your Page. In this dashboard, we are tracking both Instagram and Facebook Reach. 

Why is this important? eCommerce businesses leverage social media platforms to generate awareness, build trust, and communicate with their audiences. Tracking reach will give us an indication of how many potential customers we are connecting with during a specific period of time.

Posts

Lastly, this metric will highlight the number of posts created during a specified time frame. In this dashboard, we are tracking posts across Facebook and Instagram. 

Why is this important? Regularly posting on social media channels helps increase reach. Tracking the number of posts helps us better understand the likelihood that followers will see and interact with our posts on social media. Additionally, this also helps us stay on top of our regular social media deliverables.

How Often Do We Track eCommerce Data?

Determining how often to track your eCommerce data can be a little daunting. This is because there are benefits to tracking it daily, weekly, and even monthly. 

Implementing Databox helped us create a process that provides proactive reporting to clients. This means we can change the dates as needed to view KPIs and better understand performance.

At Making Noyze, we focus on both daily and weekly tracking. Looking at each of our client’s dashboards daily allows us to: 

• Closely monitor the performance of new campaigns 
• Create daily action plans based on data trends and the previous day’s performance 
• Quickly respond to sudden fluctuations and further investigate anomalies 

While the weekly reviews are about digging a little deeper into the data and highlighting specific things we noticed could drive results. More specifically, weekly monitoring allows us to: 

• Understand what we are doing right and how that contributes to overall goals
• Ensure there is no breakdown in performance throughout the month
• Generate actionable insight to help drive KPIs 

How Do We Visualize And Present Results To Clients?

At Making Noyze, we value data transparency. That is why we choose to visualize and present results to clients using eCommerce dashboards.

An eCommerce dashboard allows us to present metrics, KPIs, trends, and anomalies in an easy-to-understand manner. Rather than including every single metric available, dashboards allow us to only surface the information our clients care about. 

In order to present this dashboard, we then create a shareable link in Databox and send it to them via email. In this email, we will include some context into what they are seeing in the dashboard, what we will do to keep hitting their goals, and what we need to improve to be on target. 

Including the shareable link in the email is important because it gives our clients access to a live version of their dashboard, right from their browser. This means that after reading our analysis, they can return to that link to interact with the charts and explore performance across different periods of time. 

Do You Need Help Improving Your Online Sales? 

As an eCommerce business, you rely on so many platforms to grow that you can easily start feeling overwhelmed with your daily tasks. But, if you don’t invest enough time in understanding the metrics and KPIs that will help you achieve higher sales and profitability, you won’t know where to invest your resources. 

Regularly monitoring your performance and visualizing your data will help you improve your data literacy over time. This is important because it will help you generate insights and make informed decisions on future strategies. 

If you are unsure where to start, let Making Noyze take the load off your shoulders. [CTA] Add CTA Here [CTA]