General commerce metrics

The most successful ecommerce teams follow and embrace metrics to make informed decisions about backend operations, user experience, and (most importantly) customer behavior.

B2C metrics

The following list includes the most important ecommerce metrics that all businesses should be tracking for B2C:

  • Sales conversion rate
  • Website Traffic
  • Customer lifetime value
  • Email opt-in rate
  • Average order value
  • Customer acquisition cost
  • Shopping Cart Abandonment rate

B2B metrics

The following list includes the most important ecommerce metrics all businesses should be tracking for B2B:

  • Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
  • Conversions
  • Customer retention rate
  • Traffic funnels
  • Returning customers
  • Pages viewed
  • Customer actions
  • Peak periods

Key performance indicator (KPI)

As businesses go through the mapping of their digital strategy, a common marker of success is meeting set KPI’s when measuring the effectiveness of the team’s effort.

  • It is most constructive to have multiple KPIs that tell you something about the visitors and their behavior
  • Spend time with your team defining meaningful KPI’s that are not centered purely around conversation rates
  • Measure content effectiveness, not just page views
  • Set a small number of achievable KPI’s that will inspire the team
  • Short term and long term KPI’s are more achievable

Obviously, conversion is an important KPI in any digital commerce environment. But variables like time spent on the site, number of visits before conversion, and even the type of content visitors are consuming can also provide valuable insights in the overall journey and the visitor’s willingness to convert.

Example KPI

Customers viewing at the cancellation page of a mobile phone provider might be existing customers looking to cancel their subscription. However, by looking at the overall customer journey and behavior you could potentially identify if they looked at the store pages as well. It could be that visitors are concerned about their ability to cancel easily but are still willing to sign up and buy.

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