Top 12 eCommerce KPIs You Need To Track

You need to know what multichannel eCommerce KPIs to track when you’re bringing your eCommerce brand up to speed with multichannel marketing campaigns and fulfillment. It can be overwhelming to bring all of your tools, channels and platforms together. We’ve all been there.

It can become a complicated mess. But don’t let this muddy the waters when it comes down to determining your profitability and where you can make tweaks.

• Are you selling on both Amazon’s marketplace and your own digital storefront?
• Have you experimented (successfully or not) with Facebook ads, PPC and contextual banner ads?
• Do you wonder what Instagram’s shopability and the streaming wars will mean for your audience reach?

Chances are you answered yes to all of those questions. Because we’re now living in an eCommerce world where multichannel is mainstream.

You have a general sense that multichannel is working well for your eCommerce brand. But with a dramatic increase in digital natives (and your competitors), cash management becomes increasingly complicated. Now the question becomes: how can you wring every last dollar out of your multi channel eCommerce efforts?

Multichannel: Bringing Marketing, Sales and Fulfillment Together

Emma Miller, Senior Editor at Bizzmark, calls metrics the “one thing that can make or break your online presence.” She goes on: “To succeed in the competitive online market, you need to set measurable goals, choose the right metrics to track, and analyze your online performance continuously.”

These span marketing, sales and fulfillment. With multichannel eCommerce, you can’t separate out marketing efforts from your sales or your sales from your inventory management. They are all tied together.

The efficacy of your marketing efforts will affect the size of your sale, which will affect your relative shipping costs, which will affect fulfillment options, which will affect customer satisfaction, which will affect… you get the idea.

Understanding how they all tie together is the first step toward keeping everything straight when running multichannel campaigns and fulfillment. For that, you’ll need two things: a short list of critical KPIs for your eCommerce brand and a way to visualize how these metrics interplay, ultimately affecting your bottom line.

12 Critical KPIs for Multichannel eCommerce

Changing your mindset to think of marketing, sales and fulfillment as part of the same entity is one thing. But actually bringing them under one roof is another. The first step is to narrow the field to simplify things for yourself (and get a crystal clear picture of profitability and performance). These are the 12 KPIs we recommend for multichannel eCommerce:

1. Gross vs. Net Profit

With multichannel eCommerce, you have more opportunities to reach your audience but also more costs. Taking into account net profit (after acquisition, shipping, COGS and more) will give you a better picture of true profitability after everything from shipping fees to overhead costs.

2. Average Order Value

Total revenue divided by number of sales. You can increase this number with personalized offers, upselling, bundling, free shipping and more.

3. Customer Lifetime Value

A more long term take on profitability after taking COGs, acquisition, returns and more into account.

4. Net Promoter Score

The gold standard for brand performance,NPS is particularly valuable because it covers brand image, customer service and fulfillment. Most metrics will focus on one of these areas, while NPS gives you a much broader picture of how you’re doing.

5. COGS

Typically the second line item, few eCommerce brands fail to consider COGS as a metric. It’s a good standard to give you a product-by-product examination of profitability — which products are loss leaders and which are your bread and butter? How can you capitalize on this distinction?

6. Segmented Conversion Rates

Look at who is converting into customers, and use this information to tweak your acquisition efforts.

7. Revenue by Source

Segmenting conversion by source will give you a good idea of which channel works best for your brand. Building marketing attribution and UTM tags into your processes are critical for this metric.

8. Customer Acquisition Cost

How much does it cost to bring a customer all the way through the funnel and make a sale? Looking at all your metrics in one dashboard will help you get an accurate idea acquisition cost. Then you can focus on lowering it.

9. Customer Retention

Connected to the lifetime value of your customers is your retention rate. This metric goes beyond the ‘rate’, giving you valuable information into your most promising buyer personas. Which customers are coming back — and which channels brought them back?

10. Cart Abandonment

When and why are visitors leaving your store before becoming customers? Which channels are most effective in bringing them back — retargeting or an abandoned cart email, for example?

11. Landing Page Performance

Which sales pages are performing best — and why? Heat maps and clicks are good indicators, but you should tie in A/B tests with which pages lead to the highest purchase rate (and the highest order value).

12. Cost Per Order

This one is important to bring into the mix because it ties in shipping costs (along with processing and advertising). Including fulfillment in your assessment of order costs can help you identify where costs can be reduced.

Final Thoughts

Even narrowing these eCommerce metrics to a shortlist leaves the average company with a lot to keep track of. With marketing, eCommerce and fulfillment platforms typically kept separate, how can you keep them all straight?

Having the platforms separate doesn’t mean your metrics have to remain in a silo. You can use a profit analytics dashboard, for example, to bring together the most relevant metrics for advertising, sales and fulfillment. Monitoring your profit and marketing performance in eCommerce shouldn’t be hard — and a single dashboard for all your metrics makes it easier.