Analytics KPIs for eCommerce websites

For eCommerce businesses, it is critical to continuously measure your website performance as a whole. We are making a differentiation between website performance data and customer purchase behavior for this quick overview. This article is a basic primer for a website marketer or eCommerce manager.

Marketing channels to measure for eCommerce

• Organic search: Your SEO effort can be measured by the rise and fall of keyword rankings, traffic sent from your top keywords and overall organic traffic over time. By digging in deeper, you can refine your keyword strategy: consider observing which keywords lead to purchases or other conversion activities.
• Paid search (PPC). PPC advertising is common to many eCommerce websites. Marketing using paid search can lead to new customer acquisition and brand discovery. Measure the impact of each campaign and keyword to better understand the effects of your investment.
• Remarketing. It is a good idea to separate remarketing from your standard PPC campaigns. Remarketing allows you to re-engage users by displaying banners on third-party websites or in search bring them back to your site and reminding them of your brand or message. Use tracking URLs to differentiate between PPC campaigns and remarketing efforts. Tracking on-site activities as well as conversion to improve remarketing efforts.
• Referring websites. This data may include email applications as well as websites that provide links to your eCommerce brand website.
• Social referral traffic.  Social web traffic should be differentiated from standard website referrals. Within Google Analytics, you can automatically distinguish between Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Google Plus, etc. Measuring social referrals over time and alongside campaign dates is vital for making data-driven decisions with online marketing investment.
• Direct visitors. Direct traffic often means that the visitor has already been to your website or knows about your brand. This may be a second touch, and direct visitors typically have a high conversion rate. Initial acquisition efforts can lead to increased direct traffic, which has a snowball effect on overall numbers. It may be a good idea to measure the interests of direct visitors based on browsing or conversion behavior.
• Custom defined channels. It would be a smart idea to create custom defined channels to track other eCommerce marketing efforts. These efforts could include QR codes, email campaigns, misc. email links, banner/display ads, PURLs or mini-sites used to promote new products.
• Social influence. Social media influence may not be measured through traffic to a website. Social influence represents potential and reach, rather than effects. Still, this may make for a fantastic KPI for eCommerce, as it represents opportunity rather than past activity, yet it can still result in hard data.

SEO web analytics for eCommerce

• Increase in the number of entrance pages (landing pages)
• Increase in pages per visit from organic search
• Keywords sending traffic over time (specific or groups of keywords)
• Inbound links generated from content
• Social activities pointing to content
• Conversions from organic search
• Conversions from specific keywords or keyword groups
• Online reviews (positive and negative)
• Bounce rate for traffic based on keywords or keyword groups

Analytics applications

• Google Analytics is an obvious choice for many eCommerce marketers
• A keyword ranking tracker could be useful: MOZ, MySEOTool or SEM Rush
• Marketing automation with Closed Loop Analytics is vital for determining true ROI. Ironpaper uses Hubspot.

Other critical KPIs

• Contacts generated from content (converting web pages)
• Contacts created by channel (weekly, monthly, quarterly)
• Sales created by channel
• Sales created by campaign (email, PPC, display, organic keyword)
• Lead nurturing: point system to score lead activities
• Growth of segmentation lists - used in future marketing campaigns
• Social sharing to specific content (generation of clicks or traffic from social shares)
• Email referrals
• Products saved to shopping cart
• Wish list activity
• User flows through site ( reduction of barriers and drop off points )
• Email marketing views, open rates, click-through rates and landing page activity
• Sales directly connected to email automation marketing campaigns
• Sales and promotional sales and engagement data