Tracking Success On Your Ecommerce Website

There are many elements to ecommerce to take into account in order to make your store successful but it's easy to lose sight of your progress when you're deep inside your work. Many stores will track sales but they will often miss the other key performance indicators that not only offer insights but also show how successful your efforts are. We'll explore a few of them below...

I'm Tracking Sales But What Else Should I Track?

It is of course crucial that you track sales but there are also many other important metrics you should take into account. Depending on what type of marketing you're undergoing and the goals of your website, you should also be tracking:

• Enquiry Forms – how many people visit your site then fill in your contact form
• Account Registrations – how many people sign up for an account
• Engaged Visitors – how many people stay on your site for x minutes (x usually being the amount of time it would take you to convince them to purchase or sign up, etc).
• Bounce & Exit Rates – how many people leave your pages within 10 seconds and how many people exit the site entirely give you a good idea of how your pages are performing.

These are a few of the main KPIs you can track but one that is often over looked is how many phone calls the website is generating. This is not easy to track normally if you have multiple marketing channels and an offline reputation however there are special call tracking services out there that can provide this information.

Why Should I Track All These Metrics?

Tracking sales is great but it only paints a fraction of the picture. Your website becomes a black box and stops you from being able to analyse and more importantly tailor your site based on what people are doing.

Imagine that you spend thousands of pounds a month on Pay Per Click and yet your website is registering no sales through this medium. You think to yourself, it's just a waste of time, money and effort. But what you don't realise is that the Pay Per Click traffic is generating a large volume of phone calls which are turning into sales.

If you were to turn off Pay Per Click due to not being fully aware of the data, then you'd be costing yourself money.

So I Should Be Tracking But How Do I Do It?

Almost all the metrics you need to track, you can do with a popular analytics program such as Google Analytics.

Google Analytics (and others) allows you to track all the above metrics but also shows you detailed information on visitor usage and engagement, goals and conversions and traffic/referral data. Most call tracking systems also integrate directly into it, allowing you to have one console to analyse your entire site.

Most analytics programs are very simple to integrate into your site and give you amazing data that you can use to grow your site.

Data is powerful, if you don't properly track and use your data then you're putting yourself at a disadvantage against your competition so make the most out of it!