The Learning Center
AKA... The Blog
AKA... The Blog
As the month of December is one of the best times for eCommerce, it’s important that you pay close attention to every metric you can in order to know how much you are benefiting from the season and how to improve if something seems to be going wrong. November and December drive 30% percent more online sales than non-holiday months, while Black Friday until Christmas bring in 100% more revenue than all other shopping days throughout the year. This is your time to thrive in eCommerce. To keep your success going throughout the entire holiday season, keep your eye on these 5 eCommerce metrics.
Of all eCommerce metrics to track, this is one of the first you need to track during this busy season is your website’s uptime. This includes your website’s performance and reliability to work even when there’s a lot of traffic on it. A website crashing or running slowly can lose you a lot of profit. To track how well your website is doing, use a site monitoring service that will track your website’s uptime and flag you when it isn’t performing properly. Your profit is dependent on user experience. Don’t let an issue evade your notice.
Page load time is the amount of time it takes for a visitor to arrive on a page they clicked on. This goes right along with user experience. Since people have short attention spans these days, they will click off your site if it takes too long to load. You’ll lose a customer to someone else who has faster page loading times. The average length someone will wait for a page to load is 3 seconds. Just 1 second longer can decrease your conversions by 7%. To see how long your pages are taking to load, take a look at the measurements recorded by Google analytics.
These are the terms your visitors are typing in to find a specific product on your website. But if you don’t have your site optimized for the right search terms, people may never know you have the exact product they are looking for. Using an analytics tool, you can track on-site search terms to better optimize your products. By doing this, you can increase your conversion rate by making it easier for customers to find what they are looking for.
This rate is the percentage of online shoppers who add a product to their cart and never proceed to check out. If you see that your abandonment rate is high, you need to start asking questions about what could be going wrong. Maybe the checkout process is too difficult or not working properly. User checkout experience plays a big role in cart abandonment. If something isn’t going right, your customers aren’t going to fight to check out. They’ll go elsewhere to find something similar instead.
Another problem could be that the cost of shipping was so high, it scared the customer away. While you can’t pin down the exact reason, seeing a high abandonment rate will at least alert you to think about the possible issues. You can figure out your cart abandonment rate by dividing the number of purchases made by the number of carts created. Then subtract that number by 1 and multiply it by 100. By looking at this rate, you can be alerted to a possible issue as well as to retarget those who abandoned their cart to remind them to return. They could have abandoned their cart simply because they forget they added something in the first place.
Your website is just one area of eCommerce metrics you should be tracking this holiday season. You should also be tracking how you are doing online in general, specifically in the social media realm. How are people talking about you and your brand online? What are they saying? Is it positive or negative? Since expectations are high during the holidays, you won’t want to disappoint your customers. If you notice any negative experiences or sentiments being spread around, figure out a way to fix them. And if you see a positive conversation about you on social media, find out ways to improve upon those strong points. You can see what people are saying about you by looking at mentions. Through tags and hashtags, you can follow the online conversation about you and your products.
The key to tracking your eCommerce metrics is staying aware of everything your brand and website are up to. As long as both are performing well, your business will reap the profits. Focus on the metrics that matter to the success of your business. If you’re keeping a close eye on them, you’ll be able to measure just how well you do this holiday season as well as learn how to improve next season and throughout the year.
Titan Web Marketing Solutions is a Digital Marketing Agency based in Murfreesboro, Tn that works with businesses all throughout the United States. If your company needs digital marketing help Contact Us today.
Titan Digital provides marketing services to businesses all throughout the United States. If your business needs digital marketing help Contact Us today.