Cookies Preferences
Are you measuring what really matters in your eCommerce business?
.jpg)
Just like there are the core components to any recipe, the vital players on a sports team, and the essential elements of running a successful eCommerce business, there are key metrics that go into any eCommerce store.
If you ask us, there are six metrics that are of particular importance, and they are…
Each of these metrics plays into each other and it’s likely that overly focusing on one will impact your score negatively elsewhere. For example, overly optimising your site for your conversion rate, can cause your average order value and brand perception to take a hit.
That’s why it’s important to give each of these metrics the same level of attention and to view them with the same level of importance when grading your eCommerce store. In fact, these are the major metrics tracked in our eCommerce Scorecard, which we use when building any eCommerce store ourselves.
Today we want to look at each of the key metrics and discuss how you can assess to what extent your store is performing well against them, and what improvements can be made if you’re lagging behind.
It’s important to note that the goal numbers for each of these metrics will vary depending on the industry you’re in, the price point of your products, and a litany of other factors. With that being said, let’s look at each in more detail and assess how your store racks up.
Each of these metrics are relatively well known and self explanatory, but product view rate is probably the one that sees the least attention from merchants. As the name suggests, your product view rate is the percentage of total store visitors that click onto a product page. An ideal percentage should be between 60 and 70%.
Some things to think about to boost your product view rate would be the terms used in your links, the usability of your search bar, and the ability to filter and sort products on product listing pages.
Moving on to a metric you’ve probably looked into before. Your add to cart rate is exactly what it says on the tin; the percentage of customers who are adding an item to their cart. This differs from conversion rate, as it’s not guaranteed a customer will purchase said items, hence why we have abandon cart emails and so on. Nevertheless, an ideal add to cart rate is between 4 & 6% of all customers.
Your add to cart rate is largely driven by the quality of your product pages. So you want to make sure that your product imagery is high quality and showing the necessary elements of the product, that prices and sale prices are clearly signposted, you have a multicurrency offering, and that your product description gives all the necessary information.
It’s likely that your conversion rate is the metric you focus on the most. On the face of things, your conversion rate is the largest indicator of how successful your eCommerce store is at making sales. You likely know that sales volume isn’t all it’s cracked up to be
A good benchmark is around 1.5% to 3% This strikes a balance between optimising your site for sales, and - assuming everything else is correct - making the experience memorable so that customers come back for more.
We’re of the opinion that a site can be too optimised for conversions, to the point where your brand’s message loses value, but that’s one for another time. With that being said, there are certain things you want to make sure you have in place to maximise your conversion rate.
Clear signposting of your offerings - free returns or free shipping over X - throughout your site, multiple different payment options, the ability to checkout as a guest, and descriptive input fields are all key here.
Another metric you’ve likely looked into before. Your average order value tells you how much the average customer spends during one visit to your store. This can give you further insight to the average number of products they purchase, and whether or not the average order value is higher or lower than the average price of a product on your site.
Without insight into your specific store, there’s no way for us to give any kind of insight into what your average order value should be - but ideally it should be higher than the average price of your product.
We have a whole blog on how to boost your average order value, but there are much smaller steps you can implement on your site too. For example, the positioning of your shipping offering should be positioned near your CTAs, and upsell opportunities, such as product compare functionalities, post purchase upsells, and bundle functionalities, should be taken full advantage of.
Unlike the other metrics discussed here, site abandonment is a metric you want to be as low as possible. After all, if a customer leaves your store without even signing up to your mailing list or accepting browser cookies, you as a merchant don’t get anything out of them viewing your site.
In today’s eCommerce age, simply getting customers to your site is a hard-fought battle all on its own. So you want to make sure you’re doing all you can to keep them there once your marketing efforts have done their job. With so many options available to customers regardless of what industry you’re in, you need to make sure your site isn’t actively harming your chances of getting sales.
Things such as slow load times and excessive pop ups should be avoided as much as possible, but ensuring it’s easy to navigate your site really is the key thing to keep in mind here.
The final metric we want to discuss is unfortunately not one you can directly measure - brand perception.
“But how can you optimise your store for brand perception?” you may be asking. Well, there are a number of things that you can do, which will play a large role towards boosting brand perception when optimised.
Studies and surveys have shown us that when a brand has a poorly designed site or customers find it difficult to navigate the site, they think less of the brand itself. In our polished digital age this makes sense, most tech just works, so why shouldn’t your site.
This means it’s especially important to double check and rigorously test every possible touchpoint of your site to ensure that things work as a customer would expect
Similarly, you should take advantage of each and every opportunity to amplify your message, USPs, or positive brand statements across your site. This will make sure that they stay front of mind regardless of if a customer ultimately checks out or not.
Regardless of if you're confident your store will score exceptionally well or you aren’t confident that it will, why not see how your store racks up against our eCommerce scorecard.
The scorecard will give you a thorough grading of your store against the core metrics outlined in this article.
If you’d like to find out more apply for our eCommerce scorecard: here
