5 Most Important Web Metrics to Track for Your E-commerce Site

Monitoring our own e-commerce sites can be really intimidating. Using online tracking tools like Google Analytics may help but to those who are new to analytics, we got you covered. You do not have to worry about drowning in that  sea of numbers charts and menu items. The key is start tracking down some basic numbers. We listed 5 of the most basic yet vital web metrics for your e-commerce website. Once you get familiar with these data, you can start to tackle the more complicated ones and be data-surfing in no time!

1. Visitors

Unique Visitors This is referring to the number of unique individuals at your site during a certain period, regardless of the number of times they visited your site. This represents the size of the audience that you have reached out to. This figure is useful for marketers to gauge the effectiveness of their marketing efforts. This is most apt for offline marketing which cannot be tracked by programs such as Google Analytics. For example, if you were to launch a new campaign advertorial on this month’s content. However there is no increase in the number of unique visitors, perhaps it’s time to channel the resources allocated for this marketing project elsewhere.

Repeat Visitors This refers to the percentage of visitors who return to your site. A good percentage indicates that people do find your content interesting to keep coming back for more. Take note that a high percentage does not mean a good thing. If there is a high percentage of repeat visitors but unique visitors are about constant, it could indicate that there is a struggle driving new traffic to your e-commerce site.

2. Bounce Rate

This refers to the percentage of visitors who leave your site quickly having no interactions. A high bounce rate would mean thatusers didn’t find what they were looking for on your site and decided to leave. It’s as if they walked into a store, barely looked around and left the store immediately. They find nothing of value and have no reason to stay. While it’s impossible to keep your bounce rate to zero (people do visit sites by accident), reducing the rate to a bare minimum is vital. You should always be comparing your landing pages to look out for ones that are bouncing a high percentage of visitors. These are the ones who are chasing your users away. As such, you have to get rid of these pages. Comparing your high bounce pages to your low bounce pages is a great way to find out what’s working for your users and what isn’t. Every lost user is a lost opportunity, so you’ll want to figure out why people are leaving alter content and data to their patterns.

Here’s a infographic that shows what bounce rate is.

3. Conversion Rate

The conversion rate of a page is the percentage of people who completed a desired action on that page, such as filling out a form or completing a purchase. It is ideal to have a high conversion rate. This is very useful to compare between your e-commerce site’s landing pages. A landing page is usually the first page users see on your site, so it is crucial that your landing pages are getting visitors to convert into leads. Conversion rate is the ultimate measure of how successful your site is. If your site has a low conversion rate, either they are not your target audience or the site is not effective at convincing your visitors that you offer the right solution to their problem. Conversion rates can also act as a monitor for error on your site. If conversion rates suddenly drops, it could means there is an error or broken link in a certain area or page.

4. Origin of Traffic

The sources of traffic from your site can also be a fantastic metric. By knowing where people heard of your site, changes can be made to marketing strategies to further boost traffic on your site. If you’ve been working on your SEO efforts, then you should see your organic search volume increasing. Organic search is traffic arriving through search results in a search engine. If you’ve been doing good social media promotion, then you should see a lot of referral traffic from social media sites and blogs. If there is a high traffic from a particular site of another company, you may also want to use this as a business opportunity to reach out to that company to forge a more formal relationship.

5. Keyword performance

This refers to the evaluation of specific keywords that are bringing organic traffic to your site.Knowing this will enable you to adapt campaigns and content accordingly. You will know what people are actually looking for when they visit your e-commerce site, if there is a keyword that you may not have optimised but is driving traffic to your site, it would spell out benefits for your site. This is because the keyword is not competitive but still relevant to your business. As such you can build content around that keyword to give yourself that competitive edge against your competitors. Using a keyword tool can be helpful in generating specific content that your customers are searching for.

Web metrics are your tools to analysing the progress of your site. Now that you know the basics, your e-commerce is one step closer to having better days! Need more information? Contact us for more details!