Top Ecommerce Marketing Metrics & KPIs to Grow Your Store
If you want to accurately gauge the success of your online store, you need to examine a wide range of ecommerce marketing metrics. It’s not enough to know if you’re turning a profit at the end of the month. You must determine the extent to which your marketing campaigns are succeeding or falling short—along with the reasons why. Only then can you fine-tune your strategy for consistent growth and long-term success.
While your sales metrics can help you to determine the overall health of your business, your ecommerce marketing metrics make it possible to generate those sales in the first place. When it comes to marketing your store, there are four main types of key performance indicators (KPIs) you’ll need to track:
Organic Search Metrics
Customer Acquisition & Retention KPIs
Paid Advertising Metrics
Social Media Marketing Metrics
Email Marketing Metrics
Each of these categories has its own set of important ecommerce KPIs, which we’ll break down individually.
Quick Links:
Organic Search Metrics
A majority of your marketing efforts should be focused on maximizing your organic reach. Organic traffic, or the traffic that comes to your website from search engines like Google, is your most significant inbound marketing channel by a wide margin, which is why leading online businesses invest heavily in ecommerce SEO services.
Your organic reach includes not just traffic from search engines but your entire search engine visibility. You can track most of your organic ecommerce KPIs using Google Analytics and Search Console.
Organic Search Rankings
This is the big daddy of organic ecommerce marketing metrics. If you want your website to succeed in search, you must have prominent keyword rankings. The first five search results receive more than two-thirds of all traffic in a typical Google search, and nearly half of that top-five traffic goes to the top-ranked page.
While you can use Google Analytics to view basic keyword data, it still pays to invest in a more comprehensive keyword tracker like SEMrush or Moz Rank Tracker.
Change in Search Rankings Over Time
It’s not enough to know where your rankings stand. You have to examine how your rankings change over time. A sudden drop may signify a problem with the web page or a new Google algorithm update that requires your attention.
Your on-page optimization might be outdated, your site may have suffered a Google penalty, or it might have been overtaken by a competitor with better SEO strategy. By observing how your rankings change over time, you can address any potential issues and remain competitive.
Traffic Sources
Your main traffic sources are typically:
Direct traffic (people who enter your website address into their browser)
Referral traffic (from other websites)
Search traffic (organic)
Depending on your marketing objectives, you may also generate traffic from email, social, and paid advertising.
In 2021, organic traffic accounts for about 53% of web traffic worldwide. By measuring your own share of organic traffic as compared to paid advertising and other channels, you can determine if your SEO efforts are paying off and make decisions about whether to allocate more of your marketing budget to other traffic sources.
Reviews & Ratings
Consumer reviews don’t just influence your sales; they can also influence your rankings. Google reviews are especially important, but other types of reviews—whether from Facebook, Amazon, Yelp, or other major sources—can also serve as invaluable trust signals to search engines.
With that in mind, make sure to monitor your reviews closely.
Be diligent about providing an excellent customer experience
Respond professionally to negative reviews
Use critical feedback as a way to improve your service and boost your ratings
Offer incentives for satisfied customers to leave their own reviews
This won’t just encourage good reviews. It will ensure maximum customer satisfaction.
Customer Acquisition & Retention KPIs
In addition to the ecommerce KPIs outlined above, there are a few other direct and indirect ecommerce marketing KPIs that you’ll need to keep track of. The most important ones include:
Customer retention rate / returning customer rate
Top referrers
Average order value
Customer acquisition cost (CAC)
Let’s consider why these ecommerce marketing metrics are so important.
Customer Retention Rate
Your customer retention rate is the percentage of customers who come back to buy again.
Customer retention is critical for ecommerce, which is why every business needs a customer retention strategy. While an initial sale may be large or small, the real profit comes from repeat business. It costs less to cater to a repeat buyer than to attract a new buyer, and repeat shoppers tend to spend more as brand loyalty is established.
Customer retention is fairly easy to calculate. You need to establish a period of time, which may be a quarter, a year, or even the total life of your business.
Then use the formula ((E-N)/S) x 100 to determine your retention rate.
E= The number of customers at the end of the designated time period
N= The number of customers acquired during the designated time period
S= The number of customers at the start of the designated time period
So if you have 50 customers at the start of the year (S), 75 customers at the end of the year (E), and 60 customers acquired during the year (N), your customer retention rate would be 30% — ((75-60)/50) * 100.
A single customer with loyalty to your brand is sometimes worth more than five new acquisitions, especially if that customer buys on a regular basis. When you focus on customer loyalty marketing, you can gradually increase your customer retention rate and sell more products or services with less cost and effort. Remember, happy customers are loyal customers.
Top Referrers
Always keep track of your referrers in Google Analytics. These are the websites and web pages that send traffic your way by linking to your website. Your top referrers can become major allies as you pursue affiliate partners, testimonials, new product launches, and more.
By knowing who your top referrers are, you can gain serious actionable insights about the type of online shopper who gravitates toward your product and what their concerns and needs are. And when you have that information, you can target your ad campaigns and your SEO efforts more effectively.
Having high-quality referrers isn’t just a nice perk, though. It’s essential for ecommerce. Search engines see these referrals as votes of confidence in your website, which can amount to greater authority and higher rankings for you. If your website isn’t receiving a lot of referrals:
Try to create more share-worthy social media content
Add a blog to your website if you don’t already have one, and fill it with educational articles that meet the needs of your customer base without delivering a hard sell
Connect with influencers—there are numerous influencer marketing platforms if you’re having trouble getting started
Run contests and giveaways on social media and on your website; get people excited.
Reach out to high-authority websites with offers to submit guest blog material
Use Q&A sites like Quora to answer important questions and take advantage of natural link opportunities back to your site (only where applicable, and avoid sales pitches)
Average Order Value (AOV)
There are a lot of important sales metrics to monitor: customer lifetime value, refund and return rate, total sales conversion rate. But when it comes to ecommerce marketing metrics specifically, AOV can be especially important, especially if you have a varied product line.
Marketing doesn’t end when a customer visits your website or even when they commit to a sale. By effectively marketing to customers on the website itself, you can maximize your average order value and thereby your bottom line.
For example, let’s say that your website specializes in cat toys. A customer plans to buy a catnip mouse for $5. But before they complete the checkout process, they’re presented with a listing that includes three catnip toys for just $12. And then they see a list of recommended products that includes catnip refills. Then, just before the customer checks out, they discover that similar buyers also purchased an incredible faux-fur cat tree. Before you know it, the customer’s intended $5 purchase turns into a $65 sale.
This type of upsell-based marketing has proven extremely effective for power players like Amazon, but anyone can do it. If you use an ecommerce platform like BigCommerce or Shopify, you already have tools available for product recommendations and similar products. You just have to use them effectively. You should also search your third-party app store for conversion rate optimization tools. Finally, make sure to prominently highlight any deals, sales, product bundles, or new products.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
When it’s all said and done, you can easily determine whether you’re marketing efforts as a whole are paying off.
Your CAC factors all of your marketing efforts (organic, paid, social, and beyond) and tells exactly how much it’s costing you to acquire each new customer. The basic way to calculate it is to take the total cost of your marketing efforts (for the year, for the given campaign, or even for the lifetime of your business) and divide it by the number of customers acquired in that time.
So if you spent $10,000 on marketing and acquired 1,000 customers as a result, your CAC is $10. And when you truly know what each customer costs, you have a much better idea of your total return on investment (ROI). Use this information to fine-tune your customer acquisition strategy.
Shopper Behavior Metrics
Organic Bounce Rate
Bounce Rate refers to the percentage of visitors who come to your page and do absolutely nothing. They don’t convert, and they don’t click through to other pages on your site. Most often, they take one look at your site and hit the back button. This ties into organic marketing because a high bounce rate indicates that visitors aren’t finding what they’re looking for.
This might be because your title tag and meta description are misleading.
It might be because you’re ranking for keywords that aren’t directly relevant to the page.
It might be because the on-page content does a poor job of selling the product.
If a page has a high bounce rate, take a closer look and try to determine why visitors are turning away.
Time on Site
If visitors aren’t spending a lot of time on your site, it may mean that some of your marketing objectives are falling short.
Are you targeting the right customers? If not, reassess your ads and overall messaging.
Is your site confusing or difficult to navigate? An important aspect of marketing is ensuring that your customer’s needs are prominently showcased and easy to access from the moment they enter your site. Consider a redesign.
Does your site load slowly? This will cost you visitors and can even contribute to a high shopping cart abandonment rate. Check Google’s PageSpeed Insights for a quick audit.
Does your site have poor mobile-friendliness? Update to a responsive-design theme immediately.
Shopper Traffic Flow
The flow of online traffic plays a key role in understanding your customers’ shopping journey. By looking at what pages your shoppers viewed before making a purchase, you can derive actionable items for improving your store’s user experience.
For example, if you see that a lot of people visit your FAQ page before buying a certain high ticket item, you may consider deploying that information directly on the product pages.
Traffic flow analysis also provides insights into how content affects buying behavior. If you use content marketing to generate traffic, traffic flow can show you how well your content influences shoppers’ decision to buy certain products on the site.
Site Search
Users who use your online store’s search function provide you with invaluable actionable advice. You can see how people use site search to quickly find what they hope to find in your store.
This can also give you hints on optimizing your store’s navigation and promotions. For example, if you see that 25% of your potential customers search for a specific product (or product type) you may consider adding a banner to your homepage that leads people directly to it. This will allow more of your potential customers find what they need more easily and lead to a transaction.
Site search may also pinpoint the need for a better navigation menu on your online store. You should discover a wealth of UX-oriented clues in your Google Analytics account’s Site Search report.
Paid Search Advertising Metrics
While paid advertising can come in many forms, most businesses rely on a pay-per-click (PPC) model to generate traffic from targeted customers. The website owner (or advertiser) bids on specific keywords for which they want to generate traffic. Keywords have different costs depending on their popularity and potential value.
PPC campaigns can be set up on Google (including the ad links that appear above the organic top 10), on Facebook, or on any platform that allows such advertising. The advertiser sets a daily budget and pays every time a visitor clicks their ad to visit their website.
If you’re struggling to rank for your desired keywords or you just want to expand your reach, PPC can be a powerful tool. But because there’s real money at stake, you have to monitor your PPC metrics very closely.
Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)
Cost per acquisition (or cost per conversion) is arguably the most important PPC metric to track because it lets you know your advertising is actually yielding a decent profit margin. In its simplest terms, CPA is a measure of the price you pay for every new customer you acquire. It’s calculated by dividing the total cost of your campaign by the number of conversions acquired in that campaign.
So if you’ve spent $500 and generated 60 new active customers, your CPA is about $8.33. That’s an excellent CPA if your customers yield $25 in average profit for your business, but you could be losing serious money if your average customer nets you just $5 profit. Keep a close eye on your CPA to determine how your advertising efforts are faring.
Cost Per Click (CPC)
CPC is similar to CPA, but it accounts for more than just conversions. It accounts for everyone who clicks on your ad, whether they buy something or not. So if you spend $100 and generate 25 clicks, your CPC is $4.
When viewed side by side, CPA and CPC can provide a lot of valuable perspective. If your CPC is $2 and your CPA is $20, that’s a 10% conversion rate (which is considered pretty amazing in most industries when you consider that the average conversion rate is around 2.35%). A high conversion rate means you’re knocking it out of the park; a low conversion rate means you may need to reassess your ad targeting, your on-site copy, or other factors that might prevent visitors from becoming customers.
PPC Clickthrough Rate (CTR)
Whereas CPC measures the cost of each click, CTR measures the percentage of viewers who actually click on your ad. It’s measured by dividing the total number of clicks by the number of times your ad was shown.
So if your ad received 1,000 impressions and was clicked 20 times, you have a 2% CTR. Two percent is actually the average CTR for Google Ads, so if your own CTR is higher, you’re usually in good shape. If your CTR is below average (about 1.5% or less), consider testing some new ad copy. Your existing headlines and descriptions might not be very effective.
Google Ads Quality Score
Google’s Ads Quality Score is a score that shows advertisers how they stack up against other advertisers. It’s designed to measure the relevance of your ad to the targeted keyword based on expected clickthrough rate, ad copy relevance, and landing page experience.
It’s important to keep a close eye on your Quality Score because it will affect your bottom line. If you have a high quality score (7-10), you can expect to pay less for your desired results. A low quality score (6 or below) means that you’ll likely need to pay more money to reach your goals or will see less-than-optimal results.
You can improve your Quality Score by:
Writing more engaging ad copy
Improving your page speed
Improving your landing page copy
Using top-performing keywords in your ads
Including 3 extended text ads in every ad group
Incorporating Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI)
Impression Share
This is a commonly overlooked metric, but it’s extremely important. Every time your ad appears on someone’s screen, it’s considered an impression—whether the user clicks on it or not. Your impression share is a measure of how many impressions you own for a target keyword. In other words, if—on a given day—there are 2,000 total impressions for the keyword “superhero socks,” and your site received 500 impressions, your impression share is 25%.
Why is this important? Because if your share is 25%, you now know that your competitors account for 75% of the impressions. By increasing your bids or total budget, you can increase your impression share. And the more you increase your share, the more you secure an edge over your advertising competition.
Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)
This metric is where it all comes together. In short, it measures the amount of revenue earned for every ad dollar spent in your advertising campaign. Whereas CPA just weighs the total number of sales against your ad dollars, Return on Ad Spend paints a more precise picture. After all, you can have a sky-high CPA and still be hemorrhaging money if your acquired customers are only spending a few dollars.
Your Return on Advertising Spend is simple to calculate. If you spent $1,000 on advertising in a 30-day period, and those ads netted $3,000 in sales, your ROAS is $3 or 3:1. For every dollar you spent, your return was $3.
Social Media Marketing Metrics
If you want to maximize your reach as an ecommerce business, social media is essential. Over 3.6 billion people use social platforms, and that number is expected to reach over 4 billion by 2025. In addition, Sprout Social reports that:
57% of consumers will follow a brand to learn about the latest products
47% of consumers will follow the brands they love to stay current on company news
91% of brand followers will visit the brand’s website
89% of brand followers will make a purchase at some point
85% of brand followers will recommend the brand to friends and family
When we talk about social media marketing, we’re speaking in a broad sense about the use of social platforms to build an audience and sell products. While paid advertising (with channels like Facebook Ads) is certainly a part of that, we’re going to focus on the traditional uses of social media because the paid metrics have already been covered in the previous section.
Social Reach Metrics
Impressions: Any time your content is delivered to someone’s feed, it’s considered an impression.
Reach: Whenever someone sees the impression, it’s considered part of your reach metric.
The distinction between these two ecommerce metrics can get confusing; just because someone receives your post doesn’t mean that they actually see it. They have to engage with the platform and scroll down far enough to find it. That’s when it becomes part of your reach.
For this reason, we’re not including impressions as part of our “must-follow” ecommerce KPIs list. An unseen impression is pretty useless, but your reach can tell you a lot. If 60% of your followers are seeing your social content but only 2% are engaging with it, this is a surefire sign that your social content isn’t connecting with people.
This is a serious problem because platforms like Facebook and Instagram will decrease your impressions if your followers aren’t engaging. Always consider ways to make your content more compelling and share-worthy.
Follower Engagement Metrics
Social media engagements include:
Likes
Comments
Shares/retweets
Mentions
Clickthroughs
New follows
The use of your branded hashtags
You should always strive to increase your engagements because engaged followers are qualified buyers. In addition, a higher engagement rate indicates that your content is resonating with users, and as a result, your content will be displayed more prominently to more followers.
Remember, though, that the quality of your engagements is more important than the quantity (ask any brand that ever went viral for offending the public). The key is to create relevant, impactful content that encourages positive reactions. Don’t attach a sales pitch to every post.
Post Engagement Rate
Your post engagement rate refers to the number of engagements with a specific post as a percentage of your total follower count. For instance, if you have 500 followers and your latest post receives 50 engagements, your post engagement rate is 10%. It’s more precise than standard engagements because it examines the specific interest level in individual posts as indicated by your existing following.
This metric does have its limitations. For instance, multiple engagements can come from the same user, so it’s not a perfect measure of how many followers are responding. Still, it’s the best available way to determine your followers’ level of interest and to determine which types of content elicit the best response.
Brand Account Mentions
Although account mentions fall under the umbrella of engagements, they can have much larger implications. A social mention is a type of shout-out that occurs whenever another page mentions you, tags you, retweets you, highlights you in their Instagram story, or otherwise engages you in a way that’s prominently visible to their own following.
Some social mentions are easy to track—like when someone tags you in their tweet. Other, less obvious mentions can be tracked with the help of a social media platform like Hootsuite. At any rate, you want to keep track of your mentions for a few reasons:
They allow you to see how many social users you’re potentially reaching outside of your own following
They afford you the opportunity to respond to satisfied customers, address concerns and disputes, and demonstrate excellent customer service
They give you a firsthand look at the conversation around your business: What are customers saying? What’s the overall satisfaction level? What needs are and are not being met?
Social Media Clickthrough Rate (CTR)
Your social media CTR is similar to your organic and advertising CTRs. When you post a link, how many people are clicking on it?
If you’re running an ad, you can view your CTR right from your dashboard. If you’re trying to find a CTR for a regular social post, though, most platforms are less than accommodating.
Luckily, your CTR is easy enough to calculate on your own. Use Google Analytics to find the number of visitors referred to the target landing page from your social post, and then divide it by the number of social followers reached. So if your referral traffic is 7 and your reach for the post is 100, you have a 7% CTR.
By tracking your CTR for different posts, you can assess what works best in terms of marketing language, calls to action, images, and other factors that influence clicks.
Social Conversions
When you know your social CTR, you can take it one step further and determine how many of those clicks turn into sales. But how do you know which conversions stem from your social clicks?
The easiest way to track social-specific conversions is to use a special tracking URL in your social posts. You can customize your tracking URLs with parameters specific to your campaign and goals. If you want to assess your results on a micro level, you can use a different tracking URL on each social profile or designate a different URL for links shared at different times of day (to determine the times at which your links generate the most interest).
Refer to Google’s guide to setting up custom URLs for more information.
Alternatively, you can set up a goal in Google Analytics that tracks conversions from a specific landing page. You’ll then need to direct your social traffic to that landing page to ensure accurate tracking. Once you know how well your social posts are converting, you’ll have a much better idea of the overall effectiveness of the campaign.
Email Marketing Metrics
In 2021, email marketing remains second only to social media as a distribution channel for B2B and B2C content. More than 4 billion people worldwide use email, and a 2018 study from Adobe found that Millennials spend more time using email than any other generation—as much as 6.4 hours a day. Many of these users even check their email in bed.
If you can build a loyal email subscriber base, you can easily reach thousands or even millions of potential customers on demand. Email subscribers are even more dependable than social subscribers because each one has opted in to learn about products and sales. Social subscribers are more varied, with some interested in your products, some casually expressing approval of your brand, and some just trying to expand their own social network.
If you use an email marketing client like Mailchimp, SendInBlue, or Constant Contact, you can easily monitor your key metrics from your user dashboard. And you need to monitor those metrics regularly to ensure that you’re using this marketing channel effectively.
Open Rate
Your open rate is the percentage of subscribers who click through to your email campaign. The average open rate is about 18-20%, but this can vary depending on the industry and the type of message you’re sending.
A low open rate can signify that your subject lines aren’t drawing people in. Focus on best practices for email subject lines. For example:
Keep it short and descriptive
Start with an action verb
Include a hook
Create a sense of urgency
Pique the reader’s curiosity
Avoid using all caps or abusing exclamation marks
You can A/B test your subject lines to determine the type of messaging that resonates best with your subscriber base.
Also, if your open rate is abysmally low (below 10%), check to ensure that the message isn’t being filtered into people’s spam folders. Avoid using spammy or deceptive subject lines, keep your subscriber base up to date, and ensure that you use a reputable email marketing client and only send to users who have opted in for marketing emails.
Email Clickthrough Rate (CTR)
Once the message is actually opened, you’ll generally want readers to click through to a provided link—unless the message is strictly for informational purposes. As with other CTRs, your email CTR tells you if your initial message is making an impact. If your CTR isn’t as high as you would like, you might try:
A/B testing two different emails with the same business goal
Moving your link or call to action, or making it more prominent (such as with a banner)
Trimming the length of your email to focus more on the product or goal
Writing a more compelling description of the product or service
Adjusting your narrative to add a sense of urgency or scarcity
Offering a deal or discount
Email Conversion Rate
Just like with social conversion rates, you can track your email conversion rate using a custom landing page or tracking URL. Just divide the number of email recipients who took the desired action by the total number of recipients, and then multiply that number by 100 to get your conversion rate.
So if you sent the email to 500 people and 20 of them purchased a product as a result, your conversion rate for that email is 4% (20/500 = .04, / 04*100=4%). Your conversion rate is the best metric you have for assessing the overall success of your campaign.
List Growth Rate
You never want to put your subscriber list on autopilot. If you think your list is remaining steady, it’s actually shrinking. Readers will regularly unsubscribe, mute your messages, or just naturally tune out your emails over time. The only way to maintain a healthy, engaged subscriber base is to constantly keep your list growing.
One of the most effective ways to attract new subscribers is to offer a discount code. For example, your homepage subscribe box might contain a message that reads:
“Subscribe to our newsletter to save 15%.”
Then send the discount code in the welcome email. Depending on your industry, you might also attract new subscribers by offering a free, informative ebook or white pages document.
Unsubscribe Rate
In any given campaign, a healthy email unsubscribe rate falls between .2% and .5% of your total subscriber base. You need to monitor this metric carefully because a high unsubscribe rate reduces your reach and signifies that your messages aren’t resonating with subscribers.
To diagnose the issue and make the appropriate adjustments, you need to understand some of the key reasons why people unsubscribe from email lists in the first place:
They didn’t actually sign up
They feel that they signed up under false pretenses
You’re sending way too many emails
Your emails are hard to read or poorly formatted
Every email just advertises another online sale (try to mix it up)
Your messages aren’t directly relevant to the needs of your subscribers
Your messages are just boring or don’t offer anything of value
Final Tips for Tracking Your Ecommerce KPIs
We’ve thrown a lot of information at you, but it doesn’t have to be overwhelming, and it doesn’t have to occupy all of your time. For best results:
Monitor your organic and general sales KPIs about once a week
Monitor your paid advertising KPIs about once a week and at the end of every campaign
Monitor your social media metrics about 48 hours after each important post
Monitor your email marketing metrics about 72 hours after each marketing email is sent
Most importantly, don’t just look at the information. Use it to answer important questions, like:
Where are we falling short of our goals?
What steps can we take to get closer to our benchmarks?
Have we had any swift, sudden drops that may indicate a more serious problem?
Are we making money or losing money?
How can we ensure that each metric continues a continual upward trend?
As long as you’re proactive with each aspect of your marketing campaign, you’ll be well on your way to dwarfing the competition as an online retailer.
