If you’re an online retailer, it’s likely that your eCommerce business already has a mobile application.
An app works equally well for e-shops selling furniture, online casinos with games like Fruit Spiele, or any other enterprise that provides products and services via the web.
Mobile application promotes your brand to customers 24/7 and makes it easy for clients to make quick purchases. The best part is that a mobile app enables consumer actions to be visible and trackable. You can tell how many people clicked on the specific offer, how long they engaged with your content, how many pages they viewed, and much more.
However, with a pretty much endless number of metrics you can track, it can become hard to decide which ones are worth your time.
Here are our ten metrics to observe for eCommerce growth to help you make an informed decision.
10 metrics to observe for your eCommerce growth
1. Cost per Acquisition (CPA)
No eCommerce analyst can ignore the importance of how much it costs to acquire every new client. These expenses include discount offers, creating in-app marketing materials, and everything else it takes to turn a prospect into a buyer.
So why is it one of the most important eCommerce metrics?
Knowing the cost of efforts you need to make for a customer to buy for your products enables you to revise your marketing strategies and eventually lowers your CPA.
For example, after reviewing the data, many businesses find that they pay too much for their customer acquisition. A simple tweak in the adverts or a further segmentation of the audience can help reduce the costs.
2. Ecommerce Cart Abandonment Rate
The cart abandonment rate on your eCommerce website and the app shows how many people add your products to the shopping cart and then won’t buy.
If the number is too high, it indicates that something is wrong with your checkout process. Perhaps the pages load too slowly, or maybe there aren’t enough payment options. You can fix these problems by cleaning up your app’s code to make pages load faster.
Plus, consider redesigning the checkout pages and the interface (UI), making them more user-friendly and featuring all the popular payment gateways.
3. Knowing the Average Order Value (AOV)
The average order value (AOV) is how much an average customer buys from you.
You can first track the whole number of the AOV and then divide the buyers into groups by demographic, age, sex, etc. That allows you to see your highest AOV customers and target your ad campaigns specifically for them.
If you have an online shop, you can increase your AOV via different methods.
You can raise the prices of your products or services but you must be very careful as higher prices may discourage customers. Make sure to carefully plan and evaluate your strategy before its implementation.
You can also implement upsell or cross-sell methods while discounts and free shipping are still a common popular strategy today if you wish to increase your AOV.
4. Customer Engagement Drives Sales
You can measure your customer’s engagement levels via many factors such as the number of subscriptions, shares, and reactions you get etc..
If people like your content, they are very likely to interact with it and it may lead directly to sales.
Here are some of the most vital customer engagement metrics to follow that have a direct impact on eCommerce conversion rate:
- The number of people subscribing (and confirming it) to your newsletter via the app
- The most clicked links
- How long consumers stay on various pages in the app
5. Know Your Conversion Rate
If you’re doing any online business, you probably know well what an eCommerce conversion rate is. To recap, it’s the number of customers who purchase after taking a look at a product.
A conversion rate can be widely explained as a user completing desired actions predefined by your company – in summary, the total of all individual goals completed.
In eCommerce, it is defined as a percentage of website visitors who actually complete an online transaction from your store.
You can compare Conversion Rate values with other metrics like traffic sources, average order values (AOV), page views and more, to get insights into customers’ online habits.
The findings will help you not only to increase your conversion rates, but also to improve your price structure, copywriting and SEO, contributing to your entire brand appearance.
6. Customer Lifetime Value
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) tracks the average value a certain client brings to your company throughout their lifetime. It’s a metric measured by a client’s repeat transactions and average order value (AOV) to distinguish between one-time customers and those who stick around for years.
The thing is that many businesses spend too much of their valuable resources on acquiring new customers.
A more cost-effective approach is focusing on the clients who are already loyal to your brand and eager to buy more from you.
If you wish to increase your CLV, there are a few tactics you can use e.g. you can make it easy for customers to return items if purchased from you, set expectations regarding delivery dates, create a reward program to encourage repeat purchases or offer freebies for buying from you but the most important method is to STAY IN TOUCH. Long-term customers want to know you did not forget them so make it easy for them to reach out to you.
7. App Speed
Nothing makes a customer quit an app quicker than slow-loading pages and you can’t blame them.
It’s not easy to engage with an app’s content if it takes minutes to show up on screens.
Luckily, you can track the speed of your interface and its functions. When anything takes over two or three seconds to load, you should consider fixing it.
8. Gross Margin of Your App Sales
The money you made by selling your items, minus the inventory costs, is your gross margin.
In other words, it’s your profit. The average online shops on eCommerce platforms have a gross margin of 30 to 40%, and every business should aim at 40% or higher.
However, keep in mind that it’s vital to track these numbers over a long period. Don’t hassle too much about weekly losses or occasionally lost customers. The overall profit of a whole year is what matters.
9. Average Time Spent on Resolving Tickets
Knowing how much time it takes for your customer support to solve support tickets is the first step in speeding up the service.
You might consider installing a 24/7 accessible chatbot for your customer support. Chatbots are software programs created to engage with users automatically. It can respond to messages containing specific words or phrases by offering a predefined response. Chatbots can also use AI or Natural Language Processing (NLP) to analyze and understand incoming messages and provide an appropriate answer in real time.
It’ll be worth the effort because customers who have to wait for days to get their issues resolved are unlikely to return and buy from you again.
10. How Much Revenue Your Ads Bring
Dividing your overall revenue with the amount of money you pay for your marketing efforts gives you the value of how much money every dollar spent on ads makes. Your website can earn revenue when visitors engage with your ads, commonly by generating impressions, engagement and clicks.
The main aim is to keep the expenses as low as possible while reaching your target market effectively. Many things depend on the pricing model you choose so it is crucial to get to know some of these models – there are many pricing models like CPC, PPC, CPM, CPI and more. Among these, the most widely used is CPM (cost-per-thousand) and CPC (cost-per-click)
Keep experimenting with new types of ads to get the revenue/ads cost number as high as possible. Finally, the content itself should be valuable to your visitors to attract them into spending more time viewing your ads and making purchases.
Conclusion
Ecommerce, by definition, means doing business over the Internet or online.
A great thing about online transactions is that everything is measurable so keep an eye on the metrics outlined in this article. They’re all key performance indicators (KPIs), and tracking these eCommerce KPIs with specific targets in mind will enable you to make the most out of your in-app sales.