Essential Ecommerce Metrics for Growth

How can you gauge if your ecommerce business is successful? The obvious answer is if you’re making money from it. But how can you be sure that you’re making as much money as you reasonably can? And that the money you’re spending on your business is giving you a good return?

The secret to optimizing these factors is to determine your key performance indicators (KPIs) and work toward them. And the most critical element for ensuring you’re on track to meet your KPIs is to track the most important ecommerce metrics. 

Ecommerce metrics are data points that give you insight into the health of your ecommerce operations. These numbers tell you everything from how many site visitors you have to how valuable your average customer is and more. 

Here’s a look at the most important ecommerce metrics, what they can tell you, and why tracking them is important.

Customer Acquisition Metrics

How impactful and cost-effective are your efforts to engage new shoppers? These key ecommerce metrics can help you answer that question.

Traffic Sources

Data on your site’s traffic sources tell you how people arrive at your site — whether via links from other websites, through search results, or by directly typing your URL into their browser. 

Knowing where visitors are coming from can help you conclude the effectiveness of different marketing strategies. For example, if a lot of people are arriving at your site via links from Instagram, you know your social media strategy is working. If very few people are arriving from search engines, you may want to invest more in search engine optimization (SEO). 

New Customer Rate

Measuring how much of your traffic consists of first-time visitors will help you determine if you’re pulling in new consumers at a steady enough rate. A high new customer rate means your marketing strategies are working. (If your new customer rate is too high, though, that may be cause for concern — see the section on repeat customer rate below.)