What are Key Performance Indicators?
Also known as Key Successor Indicators (KSI), the Key Performance Indicators are used to evaluate a company’s success against the set targets, objectives, or competitors in a similar sector. The KPI metrics for eCommerce help the website/store owners, marketing managers, etc to know whether their business is successful or not and the areas of improvement for better output. Each eCommerce business has specific unique objectives. As the KPI metrics measure how successful the company is able to accomplish its objectives, the KPI metrics vary from business to business. Therefore, it is important to know the most important KPI metrics for eCommerce businesses.
Importance of Key performance indicators in eCommerce
The importance of KPIs in eCommerce business is as crucial as setting goals and creating strategies to accomplish the goals. Without the KPI metrics, it is extremely difficult to measure the progress of your company over time. The KPIs provide real-time data that help eCommerce owners and marketing managers to make informed decisions. The data submitted by KPIs can be distributed to larger teams for solving critical problems. It helps to understand the root causes of the problem and helps businesses drive more sales by exposing the weak threads followed by how to solve the problem.
eCommerce KPI Dashboard
An eCommerce KPIdashboard is a visualization tool that takes KPIs and converts them into simple charts and graphs. The KPI dashboard allows the business owners and marketers to track and analyze the performance of the business towards specific goals.
Some of the most important KPI metrics for eCommerce
Here are the 10 most important KPI metrics to boost your eCommerce business growth:
- Average Order Value (AOV)
- Conversion rates
- Cost per acquisition
- Shopping cart abandonment rate (CAR)
- Customer Lifetime Value
- Website Traffic
- Gross Profit Margin (GPM)
- User experience
- SiteSpeed
- Customer Support
The average order value is the amount of money spent by a customer on your eCommerce website. It is the average value of orders placed on your eCommerce store for a given time. Mathematically, the average order value is the ratio of revenue to the total number of orders in a given time. Analyzing the average order value helps you understand how well you are able to sell online using the new and existing customers.
Conversion rate is the most important KPI metric for eCommerce. The first step is to check whether the landing pages and calls to action on your store are doing their job. It evaluates the number of visitors who take action on your website. It is crucial while running marketing campaigns. It informs if your marketing campaign attracts the right audience. By working on conversion rates, your eCommerce store gets higher sales over time. To improve the conversion rates, optimize the page speed, and simplify the call to action and checkout process to encourage visitors to convert into customers.
The cost per acquisition refers to the money spent by you to acquire a single customer. It includes advertising costs, shipping costs, maintenance, employee salaries, etc. it is the fastest way to tell if your business can meet revenue targets and run into profits. The higher acquisition cost indicates the inefficiencies in your sales funnel. By analyzing the KPI metric, the eCommerce store owners can determine the strongest and weakest acquisition channels.
This metric informs about the customers who add your products to the cart but haven’t made checkout yet.
How to calculate the cart abandonment rate :
1- ( Transactions completed transactions initiated)* 100
By analyzing this metric, you will realize the problems associated with an eCommerce store. Automate the repetitive tasks and remove complex checkouts to provide a smooth checkout process for your customers.
Simply, the customer lifetime value is the amount of money spent by the customer on your website over their entire customer lifetime. Under the customer’s lifetime value help plan future marketing strategies accordingly. By measuring the CLV, customer retention increases resulting in more repeat purchases.
Website traffic refers to the number of visitors attending your website. Higher website traffic means your website is popular and remembered by the target audience and thus there is more opportunity for conversions and sales. But, high web traffic doesn’t always mean higher conversions. It is possible that the visitors leave your site without taking any action. It leads to higher bounce rates and cart abandonment. Google Analytics is a tool that informs about what types of audience visit your site, how they interact, what form of content performs better etc. thus web traffic is one of the most important KPIs for eCommerce.
It is the amount of profit generated after eliminating the operating costs. If any business continues to operate without calculating GPM, it is sure to experience losses after a certain time period. By measuring GPM, you can record every expense of your business. It directs you to decide whether to increase or reduce your product price or discontinue the product. The Gross Profit Margin is calculated using the formula
GPM in % = (Total revenue-other expenses) Total revenue *100
The user experiences KPI metrics for eCommerce measure and tracks how the user interacts with your website. This metric ultimately focuses on user engagement, website responsiveness, performance, and other parameters associated with the user. Providing a positive user experience consistently over a period of time compounds your brand's position in the marketplace. Whereas a bad experience spreads faster than a positive experience through word of mouth and drives away the customers.
For every one-second decrease in page loading speed, the conversion rate reduces by 7%. A slow website annoys visitors and drives them away from the competitor sites. Each mill second delay in the page speed implies the lost opportunities for sales. The slow-loading websites have relatively high bounce rates and low conversion rates. A bad user experience spread faster through word of mouth and prevents new customers from visiting your website in the future. Thus, if the site is not optimized for speed, your brand gradually vanishes into thin air. Google Analytics is a free tool provided by Google to analyze your website performance and also provide suggestions for improvement.
Customer support is how you respond to your customers when they face trouble with our website. It is said that when customers are dissatisfied, they are 91% less likely to buy from the same brand again. It is one of the most important key performance indicators for eCommerce. When the customer support is well defined, it will soon turn your website visitors into a loyal customer base. Analyzing the customer support metrics informs you about support methods that customer desires, best practices to provide, when and how to connect with them, getting feedback from the customer base, etc.
Conclusion
Consistently monitoring the Key Performance metrics for eCommerce businesses will help them create workable growth strategies, review the progress towards their specific goals and modify the strategies according to the data provided from the metrics. Most of the data is available on the eCommerce KPI dashboard to let you make strategic decisions. If you need any help in setting up these KPI metrics for your eCommerce business, let Vrhunec do the work for you. Thanks for reading!