Key performance indicators of an online store

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are the main performance indicators for business development. Online stores have one significant advantage - the transparency of KPI monitoring, therefore they have the ability to optimize all business processes to increase business turnover.

When analyzing KPIs, the resource owner should ask the following questions:

• What goal do I want to achieve for my virtual store?
• What determines the success of my business?

Any businessman strives to increase the number of sales from his site, attract as many visitors as possible, and increase the conversion of the resource. By studying KPIs, you will be able to assess the trend in the business processes of an online store, see gaps in work and choose the right course to eliminate them.

1. Number of site visits

Attendance of the resource should be measured by the number of guests during the day, week and month. With the help of the obtained data, it will be possible to evaluate different levels of activity and find their causes.

Aim your activity at a certain average web store traffic indicator and work on an audience acquisition program based on the selected number.

To identify visitor preferences, study open traffic statistics from competitors. This way you can get information about the sources used to increase traffic, and then use it to get even more customers.

2. Visiting product pages

Do you know which product pages on your site are most popular with users? Observing the attendance of pages with different commodity units, one can conclude which products are of interest to a potential buyer, track the form of interaction of a visitor with an Internet resource. There is a chance that you have a great quality product, but customers do not find it due to the complex site navigation.

For example, if hot goods are sold at a good discount, and access to them is only in the general catalog of the site, this is not very convenient. Greater efficiency in sales can be achieved if you create a separate subsection "Discounts", "Promotions", "Sale", etc. So you can attract a customer to this category of goods.

3. Statistics on the time spent on the site and the number of pages viewed

Very often, marketers and managers of online stores underestimate these indicators. However, on their basis, you can objectively assess the quality of your resource. If there is a low coefficient, you need to pay attention to the quality of traffic. How fast is the site loading? After all, it is known that users do not like to wait a long time. GTmetrix will help you check the download speed. After the study, it will become clear whether there is a need to optimize this area of ​​activity of the resource.

When evaluating visit times and page views, consider the fact that small-scale virtual stores and landing pages can have very low rates, while for large sites, the number of pages in demand can exceed 20.

If the site contains only a few commodity items, then, accordingly, the indicator of time spent by the visitor will be quite low, because in this case it is not necessary to choose for a long time.

4. Exit Page Types

When do visitors leave your site most often? When do they need to register to complete a transaction? Or maybe they leave the store when they get acquainted with the price of the goods? After analyzing the exit points of customers from the site, you can understand the real reasons for poor conversion, optimize the resource so that users do not have a desire to leave the site, and they complete transactions.

There are real problems in organizing online checkout if the user leaves these pages:

• Basket;
• Registration;
• Making an order.

This indicates that visitors are interested in the product, but the obstacles that arise during the purchase process do not allow them to complete the transaction.

5. Sources of Audience Engagement

Monitoring the sources of attracting visitors to the site is one of the most important methods for evaluating the productivity of an online store. This is due to the fact that there are a large number of motivation channels, and each of them differs from the others in terms of effectiveness. Do you use SEO-optimization in search engines Google Adwords, Yandex Direct to attract an audience? What about contextual advertising? Are you active in social networks, industry sites?

When observing sources, it is necessary to pay attention to the return of the channel. If one of them provides a good influx of users to your site, increasing the level of sales, invest in this source additional funds. If some channel does not give the expected results, you should decide to minimize investments in this direction or develop a strategy for optimizing its work (for example, remove or replace ineffective key phrases, words in an advertising message on Yandex, change the semantic core of website promotion, etc. .d.)

6. Conversion rate

The site of an online store should be set up in such a way as to lead the visitor from the first acquaintance with the product to the purchase. Resource conversion analysis will help make the path from selection to transaction easier. You are probably making plans to improve the site, optimize the checkout procedure. A/B testing will help determine the viability of your ideas.

First of all, optimization is required for the most important pages of the resource:

• trading card;
• registration pages;
• baskets;
• ordering page.

You need to test the “add to cart” button, the registration form on your website, the format for presenting information about the product, different options for making a purchase (with registration in the online store, without registration, with one click, through several stages).

7. Customer return statistics

To understand how interesting your site is to the user audience, you need to monitor not only new visitors to the virtual store, but also those who visit you again.

This is all the more important because getting a customer back is an easier task than attracting a new one. Tools such as the selection of email addresses of Internet users, remarketing, and an invitation to become a member of your group on social networks will help you deal with it.

The return rate of customers to your site depends on the "age" of your online store (the older it is, the higher the rate should be). It may happen that this indicator does not increase. There are various explanations for this. Perhaps your site does not have exactly the product that the client needs. Another reason may be not very attractive conditions for the acquisition.

A low rate of return to the site of visitors is observed most often in virtual stores that sell a single type of product with no subsequent sales. For example, the sites of developer companies that sell real estate first-hand become uninteresting to the client after he has purchased an apartment here.

8. Income from customers

The income from the buyer is calculated according to the standard formula: the amount of costs incurred should be subtracted from the amount of profit received. The resulting value is an indicator of the profitability of your business. If you get a low result, you should look for ways to reduce the cost of an advertising campaign.

9. Average check amount

It can be calculated by summing up all order receipts for the period under study and dividing the sum by the number of purchases. Through this analysis, you can determine the level of the average check for an order in your online store. The data obtained will help to develop an action program aimed at improving this indicator. For example, you can offer the buyer in the “order basket” to make a second purchase at a discount, or give a discount on the entire purchase when ordering two or more items.

10. Number of abandoned carts

The Baymard Institute conducted research that showed that the buyer does not complete the transaction and leaves the site at the level of the "order basket" in an average of 67.75% of cases. What is it connected with?

There are many reasons for this:

• It is possible that the purchase price in the basket differs from the one set in the product card. The appearance in the “order basket” of a line about additional payment for delivery can also push the client away, which makes the product more expensive;
• Discount promo code does not work;
• The client does not see information about the possibility of delivering the purchased goods to the region or country where he lives;
• When placing an order, a message appears about the need for additional costs, in particular the payment of taxes;
• Lack of a convenient way for the buyer to pay for the purchase;
• Technical flaws related to filling in data for making a payment.

Do a systematic check on the operation of the "order basket" in your online store. Work on new ideas to improve and simplify the checkout process, test them for suitability, implement the best strategies in life.

Don't ignore abandoned carts, send emails to customers reminding them that they are waiting for items forgotten in the cart and incomplete purchases. Try to get in touch with customers in order to understand the reason for the failed transaction. Another abandoned cart tool is Convead. With it, you can set up a sales funnel, form a user segment, where data about customers who have not completed the order procedure will be stored.

Remember, you can't let your business go with the flow. If you only skim through analytics once a month, you're unlikely to be happy with the end result. All of the above indicators require constant monitoring, comparison of current data with the numbers of previous periods, the implementation of proven ideas for website promotion on the World Wide Web. Following the recommendations and being active will certainly bring you success in achieving your goals!