Knowing all the details behind how a product is selling online is vital. This is because your success relies on identifying and quickly acting on opportunities to win more customers and earn more revenue.

But you need the right analytics to guide your strategy. While the process of shopping in a physical store is hard for most to quantify with a lot of data, it’s possible to know a great level of detail of the process that a shopper goes through in your online shopping and checkout experience.

Ensuring that you continually have access to a stream of the right data is the critical link to navigating opportunities to allow you to grow.

Key Areas to Monitor

Every online visitor is an opportunity to better understand the effectiveness of your ecommerce experience. The more tracking, data and analytics you have, the better you can know your target customers and refine your strategy. While there are a number of data points you can track to get a better idea of what’s working and what isn’t, there are two broad KPI categories that are especially key – conversions and revenue.

Conversions

You need to know your success rate for getting customers through each stage of the buying process. From the number of impressions through online ads, social or organic search to click-throughs and actual purchases, your customers’ buying journey needs to be defined and tracked so that it can be improved.

Tools like Google Analytics can track referral paths and overall website traffic through to your cart page. For added detail, you can add tools to track the actual mouse activity on each page. All of this can prove critical because knowing which part of your ecommerce experience is a bottleneck and what exactly is causing friction allows you to target the problem exactly.

 Revenue

Real-time revenue tracking gives you an indication of how your company is performing overall. Sales, average order value and revenue data demonstrate how you’re doing in attracting the right shoppers to your store and successfully getting them to see the value of your product and hitting buy.

In contrast, refunds, chargebacks and subscription cancellations can give you a sense of how successfully your customers are getting value from your product after purchase. Tracked over time, if any or all of these numbers are creeping upward, it’s a good hint that you need to change something about your product or support fast.

Subscriptions provide an additional opportunity to track and predict recurring revenue as well as see how your customers interact with your product. Knowing, each month, what recurring revenue was gained from new accounts, what was maintained by renewals, what was lost through cancellations and how much was gained or lost from upgrades or downgrades is critical.

To better understand what exactly is happening, it helps if you can segment your sales data by geography, time and customer cohort. From there, you can derive your retention rate and customer lifetime value for specific cohorts so you can focus on those that are contributing most to your success.From there, you can derive your retention rate and customer lifetime value for specific cohorts so you can focus on those that are contributing most to your success.

Focus on Your Customer

Conversion and sales data can help keep your business in tune with your customers. But you need this data to be easily accessible and consistently tracked. Ensure your ecommerce solution offers you real-time, high-quality data that you can analyze to gauge your overall effectiveness in attracting and retaining customers.