Measuring and monitoring some key performance indicators or KPIs in your ecommerce is essential to analyze the profitability of your business.
However, there are many types of KPIs and not all of them are equally relevant for analyzing the performance of an online store.
Which are the ones that really interest you? Those that reveal the reality of traffic, sales and user interaction with your business.
In this article you will learn what they are and how you can monitor them with the help of some tools.
Let's get started!
7 important KPIs to measure in an online store
There are key performance indicators to measure customer service processes, logistics and many other areas involved in ecommerce.
But it is on the website of the online store where the acquisition and conversion of customers takes place, so the 7 main KPIs for ecommerce that we are going to see now reflect exactly those processes.
In short, they talk about conversions and sales, and therefore they are indicators that should not be missing in your ecommerce reports.
Aim:
Number of visits to the website
The number of visits measures the number of users accessing the online store in a given period of time.
It is a KPI that can reveal numerous aspects of user behavior, such as:
- The products or content you are most interested in: those with the most visits, dwell time and conversions.
- The seasonality of your referrals: the weeks or months of the year with the greatest increase or decrease in web traffic.
- The most common entry channels: organic, paid, social, referral...
You can use this data to validate your online marketing strategies and boost the ones that are generating the most visibility and conversions.
2. Users and recurring users
How many users reach your website in total is an important ecommerce KPI, when interpreted correctly.
To do this, you have to dissect it in two and differentiate between:
- New users: those who visit your online store for the first time.
- Recurring users: those who have visited you before, and have returned.
Are you interested in both types of users? Of course! If your (potential) customers come back, it means that your online store is optimized and offers a good user experience. In fact, it can be an indicator of loyalty to your brand.
And, if you're attracting new people, your customer acquisition strategies are working.
Conversion rate
A fundamental KPI for any online store, as it measures the percentage of visitors who perform a desired action, such as completing a purchase.
Therefore, this indicator is a reflection of your ecommerce's ability to convert visits into sales, and it does not have to be the same for all your URLs.
To find out, do the exercise of analyzing the best and worst converting products and their differences.
From the description to the price, including images and videos, these are some of the elements that can explain a higher conversion rate.
4. Customer acquisition cost
CAC or Customer Acquisition Cost is an ecommerce KPI that measures the investment required to convert a lead or visit into a new buyer.
It is calculated by dividing total marketing and sales expenses by the number of new customers acquired in a specific period, and ideally the CAC should decrease over time.
In an online store, visibility and online attraction strategies must be analyzed and optimized, but also costs in areas such as logistics, customer service and others.
5. Average ticket
The average ticket is another of the ecommerce indicators that you should pay more attention to, as it helps you to know if your pricing strategy is the right one or not.
This KPI represents the average value of each purchase (i.e. what each customer spends on average). The higher it is, the higher your profit margin. Consequently:
- You are less affected by order fluctuations
- You can invest more in acquiring new customers
In other words: your average ticket compensates your CAC and allows you to earn more with less sales, provided it is the right one.
6. Abandoned cart percentage
It is one of the main KPIs in ecommerce, and measures the proportion of users who add products to the cart but do not complete the purchase.
Its analysis is essential to identify obstacles in the checkout process, such as usability problems, a possible rejection of shipping costs, or a lack of payment options, among others.
The ideal is to identify them and, once resolved, implement cart recovery strategies to increase your online store's revenue.
7. Revenue per customer
Revenue per customer, also known as customer lifetime value (CLV), measures the total value a customer brings to your business throughout their relationship with you.
- A high revenue per customer indicates a high level of satisfaction and justifies a higher investment in retention and loyalty.
- Conversely, a low revenue value indicates the need to improve the customer experience or to implement cross-selling and upselling strategies.
In short: it helps us estimate whether it is worthwhile and how much we can gain by impacting our own customer base, based on their revenue.
How can you monitor these KPIs?
Once the main ecommerce KPIs are clear, you may be wondering how to monitor them in the most understandable and visual way possible.
The solution is to use one or more tools that help you generate dashboards and reports with all the data.
With some of them the process is 100% automatic, so read on, because this is of interest to you!
Reports in Looker Studio
Looker Studio is the most popular data visualization tool because it allows you to centralize information from multiple sources and create interactive dashboards.
For example, you can connect:
- Google Analytics 4 (GA4): to obtain data on web traffic, user behavior, conversions and custom events of your ecommerce.
- Google Search Console: to add the performance data of your online store URLs in Google (impressions, clicks, positions and CTR).
- E-commerce platforms: to obtain sales, inventory and customer behavior data directly from your online store made in Shopify, Prestashop, Wordpress...
- Customer care software: such as Zendesk or Intercom, to evaluate customer satisfaction and its relationship with sales.
You can also integrate data from platforms such as Google Ads, Mailchimp or Meta's social networks to determine the influence of your campaigns on conversions.
Once the sources are connected, you should create a report or dashboard using graphics and visualizations appropriate for each type of data, without forgetting to include filters and interactive controls to be able to establish comparisons between different time periods.
For a source with as much data as Google Analytics 4, this is a lengthy process that you can overcome with GA4 report templates. With them you can save up to 14 hours of work.
Their secret is that they automatically group important KPIs in 1 minute so that you can visualize them in logical sections, such as "Products", "Channels", "Funnel" and others.
Your own ecommerce system
If you have created your online store with WordPress (WooCommerce), Shopify or PrestaShop, you can track your key KPIs using their built-in analytics tools.
All 3 systems have a control panel with general data on sales, orders and best-selling products, and predefined reports that also include stock, tax, customer and marketing data.
Although you will also be able to see the evolution of your conversion rate and average order value, among other indicators, the analytical depth of these reports is limited.
They often need to be enhanced by integrating these systems with Google Analytics 4 or other analytics tools.
Google Analytics 4 or other tools
You can analyze the KPIs of your online store by going directly to a data source such as Google Analytics 4, as long as it is connected to your website.
In this analytics tool you have 4 customer lifecycle reports available, one for each key stage, and they allow you to visualize all the key indicators we have seen and more:
- Acquisition Report: here you can check through which channels and sources users reach your website, based on metrics such as total users, new and returning users, number of sessions... You can also know the cost per acquisition and the conversion rate per source.
- Interaction Report: it is used to know how users interact with your website. That is, which pages they visit and for how long, the events performed and even the terms entered in the search engine. You will be able to collate all this information together with metrics such as active users, events per user, average session duration, and pages per session.
- Monetization Report: essential for analyzing revenue, user purchase process and best-selling products. Metrics such as total revenue, average order value, revenue per user and conversion rate are particularly revealing.
- Retention Report: useful to identify patterns in the engagement of recurring customers, such as those related to the frequency and duration of visits. You will be able to define them thanks to metrics such as retention rate, time between sessions and customer lifetime value (CLV).
As you can see, with GA4 you get a comprehensive view of your ecommerce performance and user behavior throughout the customer journey, but it is not the only tool you can use.
There are simpler and less time-consuming alternatives to GA4, such as:
- Matomo
- Overtracking
- Adobe Analytics
- Amplitude
- Microsoft Clarity
- Fathom Analytics
- Plausible
- Simple Analytics
- Clicky
They also collect data from your business and translate it into reports that are somewhat less overwhelming and easy to understand.
GA4 and its alternatives is the last of the 3 options for analyzing the essential KPIs in ecommerce that we have seen, and the most complex.
But remember: the automatic report templates for ecommerce are a more complete, simple and effective solution, because you can extract data from all the KPIs we have seen in a single click. Bet on them whether you have your own ecommerce or if you manage one or more clients, they are customizable!
Alex Serrano
12 years in digital marketing. Chartud creator and Looker Studio specialist. SEO consultant for 8 years. Creator and disseminator of content in different formats such as 300Segundos (newsletter) or SEOdesdeCero (podcast). Also co-founder of RankPulse.app, a Local SEO tool.