CROSS-BORDER ECOMMERCE

ALL METRICS

Product discovery metrics.

It seems pretty elementary, but you can’t attract visitors to your site if you don’t create the awareness that leads to their discovery of your brand.

These metrics will help you measure your activities that help create awareness and discovery.

• Impressions
• Reach
• Engagement
• Email click-through
• Cost per acquisition (CPA)
• Organic acquisition traffic
• Social media engagement
• Shopping cart abandonment rate
• Micro to macro conversion rates
• Average order value (AOV)
• Sales conversion rates
• Customer Retention rate
• Customer lifetime value (CLV)
• Repeat customer rate
• Refund and return rate
• Ecommerce churn rate
• Net promoter score (NPS)
• Subscription rate
• Program participation rate

BigCommerce has summed up and detailed these metrics excellently:

https://www.bigcommerce.com/blog/ecommerce-metrics/#understanding-customer-stages

Impressions

Impressions simply refer to the number of times your ad is shown to your prospects online. Impressions can be gotten from any online platform with public access such as search engines, social media platforms and others. You can increase your impressions with paid ads but this doesn’t necessarily mean you are entitled to get clicks. That’s another thing entirely. You can access your impressions on any platform you choose to share your ad or piece of content on be it Google, Facebook or Instagram.

Reach

Reach is the sum total of people who are most likely to see your content online because of they are your brand’s followers or subscribers. Irrespective of the medium of subscribers whether through email, Facebook and loyalty program subscribers. The best way to increase your reach is by consistent campaigns through social media and email to attract more followers and subscribers.

Engagement

Engagement is the junction that intersects your impressions and your reach. It works by measuring how many of your followers or subscribers (your reach) are engaging with your ad or content (your impressions). This includes click-through rates and likes/shares on social media. Engagement should be viewed as an ongoing process as opposed to a one-off thing. You want to constantly be measuring your engagement and strive to increase them using consistent campaigns.

Email Click-through

This refers to the percentage of your email subscribers who not only received and opened your email but also clicked through to your site using the link embedded within the email. You can influence this metric by creating well-designed emails (including mobile-friendly design), compelling call-to-actions and good subject lines.

Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)

Do you think it’d be helpful to know how much you’re paying for acquiring new customers (or your Customer Acquisition Cost, CAC)?

As a CBE seller, you’re going to have to invest in email campaigns, paid search campaigns, and other marketing investments in order to drive traffic and ultimately increase sales. But if the cost of those campaigns outweighs the total revenue they’re generating, then you’re wasting money.

Your CPA can be improved by categorising your campaigns to better target customers who will best respond to your campaigns, call-to-actions, and content generally.

Organic Acquisition Traffic

This refers to the amount of traffic you get on your website without spending a dime. You can measure this metric with the generic Google Analytics tool. SEO is the best way to increase organic traffic to your site. You can do so by employing the best SEO practices in every content on your website.

Social Media Metrics

Social media metrics can provide a lot of value to your ecommerce company. These are the top social media engagement KPIs you should track on a regular basis:

Likes per post: “Likes” is a catch-all metric I am using for people that have upvoted your social media posts. These will come in the form of Likes, thumbs ups, favorites or +1’s. To calculate it, you will need to collate likes on each social media platform and divide it by the number of posts on the individual platform.

Shares per post: “Shares” is a catch-all metric for “shares,” “retweets” and “repins.” This metric is indicative of the average number of times posts are shared over a given amount of time.

Comments per post: “Comments” is a catch-all metric for mentions and comments to your social media posts. This metric is a gauge of how much of a community your brand is garnering on social media.

Clicks per post: The clicks per post metric measures link click-throughs from social media posts over a given period of time. To calculate this metric, collate the number of clicks from your social media posts over a specific period (typically over a month) and then divide it by the number of published social media posts over the same time period.

Conversion metrics.

Now that you’re lucky enough to have a visitor to your store, how can you measure your performance in converting them from a store visitor to a paying customer, adding products to their shopping cart and actually checking out? These metrics should help you do just that.

Shopping Cart Abandonment

Shopping cart abandonment refers to the number of people come to your site and add items to their carts but didn’t go ahead with the purchase. Measuring this metric can help you determine if there’s a particular reason why people abandon their cart or maybe they simply forgot to complete their purchase.

Checkout Abandonment

This is quite similar to Shopping cart abandonment only that here, the customer has proceeded to the checkout phase but still didn’t make the purchase. Don’t be tempted to conflate this one with the cart abandonment rate and should be measured separately.

Micro to Macro Conversion Rates

This provides an opportunity to measure the activities (both micro and macro) that you consider important to your funnel, such as the number of visitors who click to a product page or the number of people who opt in as an email subscriber.

Average Order Value

Your AOV is the average price your customers are paying for the items in their cart when they complete their checkout process. It should be measure consistently, so you can see how it changes over time. Your AOV can be increased by selling add-ons, loyalty programs, or improving pricing, product quality, etc.

Sales Conversion Rates

This can be determined by dividing the total number of sales by the total number of visitors to your online store. This metric is important for aligning your sales with your effort or spend to generate traffic to your website.

You can gain more understanding of your conversion rates by differentiating them for example:

Set conversion rate by channel: e.g. AdWords, SEO, Facebook, etc

Set conversion rate by the category of products: because some categories may have higher conversions than others and we want to be able to tell the difference.

Set conversion rate by campaign: doing this allows you to recognise the campaigns that are converting well so you can double down on it and those that aren’t converting well, so you can fix them or stop them altogether. Conversion Rates Optimisation (CRO) can really improve the conversions of your campaigns.

Customer Retention Rate

Customer retention rate is the percentage of existing customers you maintain and keep over a period of time. The higher this number, the better you’re doing in servicing your customers. It’s important to remember to subtract your NEW customers from the total number of customer when calculating this figure.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

This refers to the future estimates of the amount of money a particular customer is expected to spend in your store during their lifetime. This is an important metric to know because it helps you to make decisions about how much money to invest in acquiring new customers and retaining existing ones. The simplest way to calculate CLV is by multiplying the average value of a purchase and the number of times the customer will buy each year multiplied by the average length of the customer relationship (in years)

Repeat Customer Rate

This is an easy metric to measure and refers to the percentage of customers who come back again to purchase in your store. It can also indicate how well you’re servicing your customers because good services attract customers to make more future purchase.

Refund and Return Rate

Depending on how you navigate this metric, refund and return rates can affect your ecommerce business either positively or negatively. Positively because the returns can be used as a strong motive to attract more customers to your online store. If a customer knows you offer refund, it eliminates their worries incase they don’t like their purchase.

On the other hand, too much refund and your business could be at the risk of loss. But either way, this metric is important to the growth of your business and should be treated as such. A good question to consider is whether refund rates is increasingly affecting a specific section of your store.

Ecommerce Churn Rate

Churn rates is a measure of your customers who don’t visit your store for purchase anymore over a period of time. It measures your customers behaviours and can reveal the likelihood of an existing customer becoming an ex-customer.

Churn rates are so important because they allow you to build a predictive model of retaining customers for your ecommerce business. Whatever your churn rate is, always try to keep your existing customers happy and excited to come back to your store.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

This metric is used to determine the the likelihood of your customers referring you to other people. It’s an interesting metric that should be considered if you would like to build your business around the word of mouth. The customers that come to your store could fall into one of these three categories – detractors, passives and promoters. More promoters mean more sales for your business.

To get your NPS numbers up, improve the quality of your product, the quality of your customer service, and the customer experience in your store.

Subscription Rate

As a CBE seller, email marketing is a high value tool to communicate with your customers and it is important to know the percentage of your visitors that have opted-in for your email list. This is the advantage of this metric.

Your subscription rate can be increased by consistent engagement with your subscription lists in a way that aligns with the tone of voice of your brand, including strong call to actions used for great email experience. All of these together makes for an easy subscription experience.

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