Learn key digital marketing metrics that are most important to your ecommerce business and how to measure or track with live example.
Whatever you measure or pay attention to grows. This is because focus propels results.
When a farmer plants, he watches how his crops germinate. He wants to know how well they are doing – if they needed more water or more sunlight.
The same applies to your eCommerce business. If you don’t measure the progress of your website, you will waste energy on the wrong project.
Remember, data speaks louder than feelings. It’s not what you think it is that matters, but what it truly is.
You need to know what is working and what is not. This way, you can spend more time on the 20% that brings in 80% of the results.
So, what are the most important marketing metrics in the digital space?
- What should you measure?
- What numbers should you focus on?
- How does one metric affects the other?
In this guide, you will learn the seven key digital marketing metrics to track the success of your eCommerce business with examples
Key Digital Marketing Metrics To Track Your Ecommerce Business
1. Website Traffic
The first thing you need to know is the number of persons coming (visit) to your website – traffic. While traffic may not be the end of it all, it is very important.
Traffic gives other metrics air to breathe. You need to know your traffic so you can make a good judgement of every other data.
For example; if your Adsense income is more from impression than clicks, then your website traffic becomes important.
Important Marketing Metrics To Measure Under Website Traffic
- Hits
All demands place on your website are hit. This could be a file download, or search engine bots crawling your website.
- Visit
Your visit is the total number of times someone visited your website, whether by referral or direct entry.
It refers to every person who visited your website in this period. So, if a customer visits the website 10 times, it’ll count as 10 visits.
- Unique visit
Unique visit is the number of distinct visits on your website. It tells you the actual size of your audience.
You can have your a loyal fan who visited your article about online business that pays, 10 times a week. Unique visit counts the entire 10 times as 1 visitor commonly known as unique visitor.
This way, you have a better reflection of your site’s popularity.
By default, you will always have more visits than unique visit. And that makes unique visits a better metric than the visit.
So, how do you increase your website traffic and ensure repeated visit?
The first is to monitor this metric and see what post or pages is getting the highest page views.
How To Improve Your Website Traffic
- Search Engine Optimization
SEO is great if you have a long-term plan for your business. This will need more of your patience and ranking skills.
- Social Media Marketing
You can run ads on popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and more. Only use this if you have products to sell where you can direct the traffic to a landing page.
- Content Marketing
If you want people to keep coming to your website, then you need to invest in contents. By publishing great content, you build trust and engage your visitors.
Among all of this, content marketing is key. People will only come back to your site when you publish articles that interest them.
With contents, people will share your articles on social media while you still rank well on Google.
2. Bounce Rate
The second key digital marketing metrics you should focus on is your bounce rate.
From the word bounce. To bounce means to move up and down, or back and forth.
Your bounce rate tells you the number of persons who came to your website and leaves immediately.
It means people actually came to your site (you had visits). But they didn’t engage with your website.
So, if you have 100 visits to your blog, and your marketing metrics show you have 90% bounce rate, this is what it means.
100 people came to your website. 90 people left without clicking on any link that leads them to another blog post or page on your website.
So, it is only 10 people who interacted with your website.
But here is the thing…
Bounce rate does not tell you the entire story. It does not tell you how long a visitor stays on your website.
It’s possible out of the 90 people who bounced (left doing nothing), 85 actually read your post till the end.
And at the end of the article, clicked on an external link like your Google Ads. This is common with news blogs.
You can use my metrics below to measure your bounce rates.
- 0% -25% – Excellent
- 26% – 40% – Very Good
- 41% – 65% – Good
- 66% – 80% – Poor
- Above 80% – Very Poor
How To Reduce Your Site Bounce Rates
- Write relevant contents people want to read.
- Optimize your website to load under 3 seconds, which also influences how high you will rank on Google.
- Design your website to be mobile responsive. It fits well on all mobile devices.
- Part of what makes your website attractive is the color you use.
- Keep rinsing and repeating till you get what works best to make your visitors stay longer.
Note: This bounce rate differs according to website types. A good bounce rate score for a healthy blog will be excellent for a news blog.
But once your bounce rate is above 80%, it is poor, irrespective of your website type.
Another of the key digital marketing metrics you should consider is the average time users spend on your site.
He who spends one minute on your website is likely to interact more than he who spends 30 seconds.
3. Page Views
Page views allow you to know how visitors are interacting with your pages. It lies between your views and hits.
Page views tell you how many pages visitors have viewed, regardless of how many times.
Thus, we can refer page views to impressions.
Now, it is good to compare your unique visitors with page views if you sell products. Because every new page view is an opportunity to make your visitors buy.
Visitors who load up the most pages engage more with your site. And the more they view a particular page, the higher your chance of converting them.
We call these visitors the warmest leads because they are close to buying or signing up.
Another of digital marketing key metrics to track is your average cost per page view. It tells you how much you are paying to have each visitor on your landing page.
How To Increase Your Page Views
The best free way I know is to keep your visitors reading. The more they read, the more you suggest other contents to them, the more they open.
You see why I said content is king in any digital marketing strategies.
Also, if your content is long, you can split it into pages. This will persuade readers to want to know more, thereby increasing your page views.
4. Referral Source
Not all digital marketing key metrics shows numbers, some shows only details.
And one of them is the referral. Your website referral tells you where your visitors are coming from.
It helps you know if visitors typed your site address on their browser or came from a third party website.
The third-party site could be a social media site (Facebook) or search engine (Google) or another blog site.
This is very important because it helps you know if your marketing efforts are paying off and where to put more resources.
Referral tells not only about the traffic source but also helps you know what persons are coming to your site.
So, if most of your website traffic is from a health Facebook Group, that tells you a few about your visitors’ interest.
If you implement the best SEO practices, referral is the way to know if your efforts are yielding results.
If you pay for a social media ad, referral is a quick way to know the ad is sending people to your landing page.
Give time to know your referrals so you can improve on what matters.
5. Track Conversion Rates
Conversion rate is one of the most important digital marketing key metrics you should track in eCommerce business.
It tells you how many of your visitors are helping you achieve your goals. These goals could be you collecting their emails or them buying your products.
The best way to measure your conversion is to look at the end results.
Example:
If I want to know how many people bought my book about Social Media For Business.
I will place a script on the landing page and also check the number of metrics on the “Thank You” page.
Now the “Thank You” page comes up immediately after someone finishes buying.
So, whosoever sees this page shows he/she has already paid for the book.
As much as visit, views, engagement are important, conversion is more important.
How do you know you are not wasting money on ads? Your conversion will tell you.
This, among many other digital marketing metrics, is key if you are serious about business.
How To Improve Your Conversion Rates.
- Split Testing
Create two similar versions of your landing page, but with minor changes. This change could be colours or even text on the site.
The difference should not be too obvious. Example is changing the button colour, call-to-action text, image placement and more.
Show these two pages to the same audience and watch which of them sells the most.
This is what we call split testing, or A/B testing.
Whatever landing page that works best, you continue with that. Split testing is best with paid traffic than free traffic.
- Re-Marketing
Do you know people are more likely to buy your product if you can get them in the mood to buy first?
Study shows that customers buy more in the evening because at this time of the day they are already tired. Hence, they become more emotional and do impulse buying.
Also, people are more likely to buy your products if they can prove your expertise on the subject and they know you know what you are saying.
So, one of the best way to increase your conversion rate is to re-market your product and show the right products to the right person.
6. Returning Visitors
This is one of the key digital marketing metrics that helps you know the number of person coming back to your site. This doesn’t include first time visits.
A goal of any content creator is that his audience keeps coming back for his contents.
If you have huge numbers of first-time visitors but low returning ones, then it means your marketing is faulty.
In most cases, I encourage you to check your sales page if it is persuasive enough.
The number of people coming back for your contents should be greater than those coming for the first time.
Because your best visitors are your existing visitors.
The actual figure of returning visitors is not always accurate because people will change phones or use different browsers. So, whatever you get is an estimate.
How To Keep People Coming Back To Your Website
- First, ensure you optimize your website for speed and easy use for visitors.
- Be consistent in your publishing new articles and updating existing ones.
- Another way also is to let them have a hint of your next article. Doing this, they expect and return to read once you publish.
- Also, use social media and email to keep people engaged and ask them to read your new article. With these, they keep coming back.
But the best way so far is to be consistent with publishing content. I will keep coming back if there is a promise of new content on your site.
7. CPA, CPL, and ROI
If you own an eCommerce website, then these are key digital marketing metrics you must track.
PPC tells you how much you are spending per click with no concern if they convert or not.
CPA tells you how much you are spending after your visitor may have converted.
You can achieve this by looking in to your analytics to know how many visits you have and how many are converting.
Cost Per Lead (CPL) tells you how much you are paying for leads. Leads are details (email, phone number) you receive from visitors.
ROI tells you about your total profit after removing all expenses–ads, hosting, and more.
How To Improve Your CPA, CPL and ROI
The best way is to target the right audience with the right offer. Target demographics with less competition, and you won’t have to spend much on ads.
Spend on advertising that gives results (CPA) rather than one that charge for showing up.
Example:
Let assume you want more people to visit your shoe’s landing page, and you decide to run Facebook ad.
Don’t pay for impression (views). Don’t pay for engagement (likes, shares, and comments). Pay for action (click on link or conversion).
What To Do With These Key Digital Marketing Metrics
All of this data will help you know how much you are spending on leads and if they are profitable.
While this data may look hard to understand, they are not. Also, the benefits of knowing how to interpret this data are huge.
This way, you will know where to focus your marketing effort.
If you what each customer buys from you is more than the cost of bringing them to the product page, your business is doing great.
I encourage you to optimize your website and publish more contents so you can benefit from free potential customers that Google sends you every day.
