3 Popular Tools to Track Key E-commerce Metrics

It is virtually impossible to know how well you’re doing in your e-commerce business without diligent tracking of your efforts. You must deliberately target the most relevant and important metrics to the success of your business. Tracking the most important e-commerce metrics is essential to boosting your e-commerce sales and revenue. Here are three of the most popular tools that have been tested in the industry and have proved quite useful for finding the right solutions irrespective of whether your e-commerce store is hosted on an e-commerce platform or independently on your own website.

1. Marketing Analytics Tools

There are many analytics solutions out there in the e-commerce market. But, the best of these tools are often built into your marketing software. Presently, most of the popular social media platforms have in-house analytics tools e-commerce business owners can always take advantage of. In that wise, Facebook Ads Manager, Google Ads, and most email marketing platforms give you real time valuable information on how your marketing campaigns are performing. However, because of their peculiarities, many of such in-house built-in tools can be quite limiting in usage. You can decide to choose freestanding solutions instead. Many of these solutions provide valuable insights into the entire customer journey. This helps marketers and business owners to better understand the blended efficiency of their marketing spend.

2. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is readily the most popular metrics tool out there. It is one of the best e-commerce metrics tools you can easily use at no cost whatsoever. Google Analytics tools have the added advantage of easy and seamless integration into your e-commerce business. If you use Google Analytics, you can see the most visited pages and most viewed products on your website. Through it, you can easily determine which of your web pages bring the most revenue for your business. You can find out how your marketing efforts impact website visits, conversions, and much more. If you pair Google Analytics with heat mapping and AI-driven platforms, it becomes possible for you to get real time, a full picture of what’s driving conversions in your e-commerce business.

3. Popular E-commerce Platforms

These days, millions of e-commerce business owners now prefer doing business on the platforms of popular e-commerce sites instead of doing so independently. So, if you’re selling on an established platform rather than on your own site, all the valuable data you need can be found on your dashboard. You may even decide to add a third-party tool to expand your analytics data in such platforms. Presently, the platforms of choice among most e-commerce marketers include Shopify, WooCommerce and Adobe Commerce. Through these platforms you can easily have access to valuable metrics on sales and returns, checkout behavior, and customer retention. 

6 Recommended E-Commerce Metrics for Tracking

Typically in e-commerce business, metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) are extremely important data points that allow business owners to evaluate the performance of their online stores. E-commerce business owners rely on these metrics to monitor customer behavior, sales trends, and marketing performance to better assess the profitability of their marketing efforts. However, what is most important is to know the right e-commerce marketing metrics to diligently track to ensure you’re optimizing your website for current trends. If you understand what you want to measure, it becomes easier for you to determine exactly what you should be tracking.

Following are 6 of the most important metrics recommended for tracking by experts.
 
1. Conversion Rate

For good business to take place in your e-commerce website, customers must come to your website. If these customers come to your website, you must be able to convince them to take action. If you can’t convince them to take action, your business will struggle to get a good return on investment (ROI) on your money and effort. The metric that speaks to how visitors to your website react on the site is Conversion rate (CVR). Technically, conversions can include, when visitors make a purchase, opt in to receive emails, share on social media, submit a contact form, complete a poll, register for an account, follow on social media, adding an item to a wishlist, or review a product. The business goals of the business largely determine the CVR to focus on. From the CVR metrics, you can easily determine what works and what to fix. In your e-commerce business, striving to fix conversion leaks is the surest way to increase revenue even without spending more on ads.
 
2. Average Order Value

If you get visitors to your website, can you get them to make a purchase? Even if you manage to get them to make a purchase, can you get to increase the amount of each purchase? To handle this, the metric you need to measure is the Average Order Value (AOV). This is simply the average amount a customer spends when making a purchase on your website. You can make customers spend more by enticing them to buy in bundles, through upselling, and through volume discounts. This is the best way to increase you AOV and therefore an important metric to measure in your e-commerce business. If you cannot devise credible ways to increase your AOV, you’ll merely be working harder but making less money.
 
3. Return on Ad Spend

Advertising online costs money, good money in some cases. Even at that, advertising is still one credible way to reach your customers. To cut costs and for your ads to still be effective, you must diligently measure you ad spend metrics. If you diligently track the success of each advertising campaign, you can ensure you’re making the most of your ad spend. This metric is known as Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). This metric can help you to fix your ads targeting and effectiveness to reduce wasting money on poor ads.
 
4. Returning Customer Rate

Repeat customers are the lifeblood of any successful e-commerce business. This is why you must endeavor to measure two vital metrics about repeat customers. These metrics focus on returning customer rate and customer lifetime value. These two metrics are important for a sustainable e-commerce business model. You must therefore endeavor to focus on customer retention strategies like email, SMS, and subscriptions. This will help you to get more and better results even without spending more money on paid ads. This is about the best way to have a sustainable pathway for long-term business growth.

5. Customer Acquisition Cost

Customer acquisition is the primary purpose of e-commerce marketing/advertising. In doing this, you must track the ROI on your efforts. It will help you to determine the average cost for each new customer your business attracts. The metric you need to diligently measure is known as Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). Significantly however, it is much cheaper to retain customers than to acquire new ones. The reason you must always have a keen eye on the ROI on your efforts to bring in customers. Marketing strategies like Email, SMS, and loyalty programs are great for customer acquisition at reduced costs.

6. Cart Abandonment Rate

If your cart abandonment rate is going up, it means something is wrong with your checkout process that needs urgent fixing. Cart abandonment simply means unfinished shopping business. Even though every e-commerce website has to deal with unfinished purchases, but excessive shopping cart abandonment can be a real problem that needs fixing. It is therefore very important to diligently track your website’s cart abandonment rate (CAR) and strive to have it improved without any delays. If through the CAR metrics you notice that more and more shoppers are abandoning their carts, it means your checkout process needs fixing. The process may either be too complicated, cumbersome or too boring. The vital info from the CAR metrics can help you determine how best to make your checkout much simpler, in addition to follow-up emails to get shoppers to complete their shopping.