If you run a business that relies on Ecommerce KPIs, you know numbers speak louder than words. For statistics, that goes double.
The most relevant statistics to businesses are key performance indicators (KPIs). To marketers, the precise nature of KPIs gives an advantage by allowing to attach a metric to each step of prospective engagement.
KPIs are so specific that it’s possible to get into the weeds and lose sight of the bigger picture. We’ll keep this in mind as we learn what KPIs are.
What’s a KPI?
Aren’t KPIs just a fancy name for metrics? No, the best ecommerce business owners know better. While all KPIs are metrics, not all metrics are KPIs.
As stated above, a KPI is a Key Performance Indicator. An indicator is any ecommerce metric of your choice, tabulating how people view and interact with your material. Rather than viewing raw data itself, indicators will do the math for you and give you the highlights and comparisons. Given this, a key indicator is one that is key to the success of any marketing initiative, such as an advertisement campaign.
What are some qualities of a KPI, and how can we categorize them? KPIs are numerous and the right ones are specific to your business and strategy, so here we’ll categorize them with broad strokes.
- What are your business objectives, and does this KPI align with them?
- Who impacts the KPI and how?
- Is the KPI quantitative (countable) or qualitative (uncountable)?
- Is it a low-level (frequent measuring) or high-level (rare measuring)?
| Types of KPI | Low-level | High-level |
| Quantitative | Countable KPIs monitored regularly, e.g., impressions, likes, clicks. | Countable KPIs measured less often, e.g., search engine rankings, year-over-year growth, customer retention. |
| Qualitative | Uncountable KPIs monitored regularly, e.g., sentiment of comments, contents of forms. | Uncountable KPIs measured less often, e.g., solicited surveys, write-in reasons for unsubscribing |
So now we understand why KPIs are useful and have a basic understanding of what they are. As you may imagine, there is a huge variety of KPIs that you could use. But which KPIs are relevant to you and your ecommerce businessBest Ecommerce Dashboards?
1. Average Cost Per Order
Cost per conversion and cost per acquisition are worthwhile KPIs but cost per order (CPO) is by far the most accurate measure of the success of your campaigns, and the most important for any ecommerce business to track. For example, CPO can help you understand how cost-effective your marketing campaigns are as compared with the average revenue per order.
Quite simply CPO is the total cost of advertising campaigns divided by the total number of orders they netted you. Depending on the price of your product or service, the right CPO for you may be different from another ecommerce business.
2. Average Order Value
The other side of the coin for CPO is average order value (AOV). Whereas CPO measures how much it cost you to get each order, AOV tells us how much each of those orders was actually worth.
AOV is calculated by dividing your total revenue by the total number of orders. By improving average order value, you can boost your revenue without necessarily needing to hook new customers. By learning more about what your customers are willing to pay and why you can adjust pricing and marketing strategies to increase what your average customer spends.
3. Repeat Purchase Rate
People who track ecommerce KPIs know that while conversions are what we all want, there’s something better than purchases… repeat purchases.
The repeat purchase rate (RPR) is calculated from the total number of repeat customers divided by the total number of customers. This percentage is an excellent ecommerce KPI because loyal customers can be far more valuable than one-time buyers who later fail to engage. Focus on maximizing repeat purchases to improve your customer lifetime value.
Conclusion
You may need to track these ecommerce KPIs, but your business likely needs to track even more. And there are many more KPIs to research and discuss. Which ones are important to your business?
