Growth is a key goal in any entrepreneur’s mind. But if you’re not paying attention to the right signals, you could be stuck spinning your wheels.
The big decisions you make about your business should be informed by specific metrics that show its health in different areas. Each area has its own performance indicators. Analyzing the right ones — and doing it with the right tools — lets you actualize what’s working and what isn’t. As business management master Peter Drucker once said, “What’s measured, improves.”
In this article, we’ll cover five key metrics that BigCommerce stores should definitely be tracking in order to fuel growth, why they matter, and how to track them. So, without further adieu, let’s jump into the data.
5 key metrics you need to grow
1. Add to cart rate
What is add to cart rate? The total percentage of visitors to your store who added at least one item to their cart while browsing.
Why is it important? Tracking the add to cart rate helps you get a strong overview of both your store layout and the appeal of your products.
When looking at this metric in Google Analytics you can use it to deduce:
- How well your products stand out to visitors
- If your site design and marketing help promote certain products
- How attractive your store offerings are overall
With this data, you can make changes to your store, switch up your marketing for specific products, or even cut supply to create demand for specific products.
You could also try product recommendations and personalization to help improve the add to cart rate on your store.
2. Cart abandonment rate
What is cart abandonment rate? How many of your visitors added items to their cart and left the store before completing checkout and making a purchase.
Why is it important? Cart abandonment could stem from a handful of issues. A slowdown of the checkout process, lower prices being offered for items elsewhere, or even requiring shoppers to make an account before buying are all potential obstacles that cause visitors to leave their carts behind.
Knowing how often this occurs can help you streamline your checkout process by pinpointing common dropoff points. To reduce cart abandonment, you’ll want to make the checkout process as intuitive and trustworthy as possible.
3. Customer lifetime value
What is revenue per customer? The amount generated from a single customer during their entire relationship with your business.
Why is it important? Understanding the lifetime value (LTV) of each customer is critical for your decision-making process. It tells you how much you should spend on attracting new customers, shows you which kind of customers to target, and gives you a benchmark to spend on retaining highly valuable customers.
Once you’ve calculated the LTV for your customers, you can also pinpoint which of your products high-LTV customers want more of, and promote the ones with the highest profitability.
4. Conversion rate
What is conversion rate? The number of visitors who took a specific action on your store (typically making a transaction) divided by the total amount of sessions then multiplied by 100.
Why is it important? Tracking this rate helps you measure overall performance and activity on your website. It also helps you gauge if your store is set up so you meet your sales targets. And best of all, when you improve your conversion rate you’ll also automatically improve your revenue generation.
Conversion rate is a flexible metric as well in that you can choose which specific customer action you want to track. It could be subscriptions, purchases, newsletter signups, coupon redemptions, or anything else you want data on.
5. Pages per session
What are pages per session? The average number of pages a visitor reaches on your site during a session.
Why are they important? It’s a great tool to determine how engaging the pages on your store are. Users may find certain pages due to sheer interest and captivation, then move on to recommended ones if you set your design up well. Depending on how long you can engage a single user, you can create deeper connections and drive more revenue.
How to track key metrics for your ecommerce store
Analyzing your data with the right tools is just as important as knowing which metrics to prioritize.
As a BigCommerce user, you have a few options for where to see the metrics we’ve listed above.
Ecommerce Analytics from BigCommerce
BigCommerce’s Ecommerce Analytics comes included in every BigCommerce plan.
Ecommerce Analytics offers Store Overview reports, Real-Time reports, Marketing reports, and Orders reports, along with other more in-depth information like Abandoned Cart and Abandoned cart recovery reports.
These can offer a good baseline of reporting for your store, but to get high levels of customization and 100% accurate reporting, there is another solution.
Littledata Advanced Google Analytics integration for BigCommerce
You can view data through Google Analytics, the most widely used analytics platform, and ensure accurate sales and marketing data across the user journey with Littledata’s Google Analytics plugin for BigCommerce.
Adding Littledata’s platform to your BigCommerce store enables you to track ecommerce events like product list views, adds-to-cart, all checkout steps, and orders/refunds. Tracking these along with each step of the customer journey is not only critical to calculating the metrics listed above but also gives you a truly complete picture of your store’s health.
The Littledata app works with many themes as well, including headless setups, and utilizes more robust tracking than a GTM implementation. You can add the other apps in your data stack onto Littledata’s app as well, including services like ReCharge for subscriptions.
Conclusion
Your store’s health depends on your ability to track key events and metrics that offer insight into your customers’ behavior along with the success of your product offerings and marketing initiatives.
The five metrics we shared above are among the most critical to monitor for your store, as they provide actionable insights that can help you tweak your store and promotion methods to drive greater revenue.
Remember, though, that your data is only as good as the tools you’re using to report it. Whether you use BigCommerce’s in-built reporting tools or Littledata’s Advanced integration for BigCommerce, make sure that you’re getting a full picture of your customers’ behavior and using accurate data to make decisions on the future of your store.
This is a guest post from Rithesh Raghavan, Director at Acodez, a Digital Agency in India. Having a rich experience of 15+ years in Digital Marketing, Rithesh loves to write up his thoughts on the latest trends and developments in the world of IT and software development.
