Ecommerce platforms use hundreds of metrics to highlight data and statistics surrounding your business by providing constant reports on regular trends. Bear North Digital, our high-impact, full-service WooCommerce marketing agency, breaks down which WooCommerce metrics to pay close attention to, paving the way for success.
What Is the Difference Between Metrics and KPIs?
Metrics quantitatively measure aspects of your business like sales and return rates, effectively tracking performance and helping you better understand how each sphere of your WooCommerce store is doing.
Although metrics alone don’t provide much insight into the workings of your business, regular reports on these metrics allow an individual or small team to uncover progresses for tactical or operational objectives. These objectives contribute to future improvements.
KPIs consist of types of metrics that turn tactical objectives into strategic ones by delving into the workings of each. Unlike general metrics that statistically chart business activity, KPIs emphasize how performance affects your set business goals. Multiple teams or departments use KPIs to assess success rates, cause and effect, and proper decisions to improve your overall store, making it relevant and competitive.
Conversion Rates
Landing pages have tens to hundreds of visits daily, depending on their Google rankings on the search engine results pages (SERPs). While the average page has a conversion rate of between two and three percent, high-ranking pages sometimes have higher rates of five to 10%. Still, a high rank doesn’t guarantee viewers will click on a product or call-to-action button, moving forward with the purchasing process.
To see if viewers actually take action, from signing up on an email list to following internal links to other pages, check your Google Analytics’ Average Sessions data for every landing page. It’ll relay how long visitors stay on the page and how long they should be staying (or how long you should be holding their interest) to convert.
From there, see what makes your high-conversion pages successful, and implement those tactics into your low-conversion pages.
Revenue per Visitor
Revenue per visitor (RPV) takes the conversion rates WooCommerce metrics one step further by comparing total site visitors to those who convert into buyers. By adding up the total revenue of all buyers and dividing that price point by all visitors, you determine the revenue per visitor. This vital number shows how much each potential customer is worth on your site.
If numbers begin to decrease, according to prior reports, it usually means you have fewer visitors, indicating higher bounce rates from slow-loading pages, broken links, and missing CTAs. For instance, if you had $25,000 in sales last month and 2,500 visitors, your RPV was $10. A drop in visitors effectively drops sales, so if you have 2,000 visitors this month, you may have $18,000 in sales and a new RPV of $9.
Fewer purchases also negatively impact RPV. Inaccurate marketing leads passive visitors with low-purchasing intent to your site, and low AOVs (average order values) contribute to smaller total cart values. For example, even if you have the same amount of visitors averaging 2,500 views, your revenue may lower to $15,000 for any of these reasons.
Transaction Quantity
You should also look more closely at buyers’ habits, considering not only what products encourage more sales, which helps you understand what your target audience wants, but typical order sizes. Does most of your profit come from a few buyers purchasing tons of items or a larger buyer pool with smaller cart values?
Use these findings to decipher how many large, small, and total transactions you obtain and how these numbers stack up to the competition. By using KPI measures and general industry standards, see if you fall above or below the curve. If above, determine what works so you can keep it up, and if below, consider improving transaction processes with sales, enticing CTAs, or advertising.
Customer Lifetime Value
An essential step to improving the transaction process lies in enhancing CLV. Customer Lifetime Value measures loyal customer revenue each year starting from their first purchase with you minus the costs it takes to draw them in and maintain the relationship with top services. Therefore, a diminished CLV means higher one-time purchases from non-returning customers for any reasons, including:
- Poor customer care or products
- Difficult checkouts
- High competition and little incentive to shop with you
- High prices
- No initiatives like email alerts or sale notifications on your part
Since CLV hinges on returning customers providing you with steady revenue, engage with your customers on social media, email marketing campaigns, and loyalty programs. Most importantly, track their time on your website and how they spend it with the following steps:
- Determine where purchases occur: For most WooCommerce websites, customers need to add products to a shopping cart to save and check out products. However, some buyers decide to purchase a product with the immediate checkout option, which eliminates the shopping cart step and makes that landing or product page a transaction site.
- Encourage accounts: If customers create accounts, track their purchasing journey to decipher where they spend their time and where you’re more likely to lose them. Seeing their scrolling or viewing habits and history gives you the information you need to get them to return. For example, if they were viewing jerseys before leaving, send customized emails for those interests.
- Measure Spending Habits: Determine what specific customers tend to purchase and measure the revenue at every step of their purchasing journey. That way, you’ll understand if their spending becomes unusually lower or higher than during previous visits and whether their loyalty is swaying.
- Considering lifetime value: Take their most recent revenue and compile it with their annual revenue records to determine the total spending habits of returning customers. Subtract expenses, like customized advertising, from this total for your profit from that loyal customer. Doing so shows their value to your store and ways to maintain relationships.
Cart Activity
The best way to maintain relationships with loyal or potential customers stems from regularly checking cart activity. Of all WooCommerce metrics, this one serves as the most valuable, providing actionable insights into what viewers show interest in, would consider purchasing, or have left in the dust.
WooCommerce sites alert you when customers add one or more items to their cart. If this occurs regularly, that means your selection, user experience, and marketing campaign strategies, which highly correlate with purchases, are effective. Unfortunately, plenty can go wrong between adding products to a cart and checking them out.
Cart Abandonment
Up to 80% of occupied shopping carts become abandoned when an underlying factor keeps the potential buyer from completing their purchase.
Sometimes, customers browse for specific items across numerous platforms or shops, trying to find the best quality at the most affordable prices. So, they add your product to their cart before leaving to check out their other options. Other times, they put their purchase on the back burner until they can afford or need the item, but most cart abandonments occur due to difficulty during checkout.
Between 60% and 80% of abandonments stem from a long-winding or difficult checkout plugin. Since the average attention span is 8.2 seconds, not many will wait for slow-loading pages or want to fill out excessive information boxes that prolong the process. Instead, choose your plugins carefully, ensuring they allow you to add or remove fields as you deem fit, leaving you with a clean one-page checkout.
Test your store’s cart abandonment rate by dividing all purchases by total occupied carts, subtracting by one, and multiplying by 100. If your plugin isn’t enough, consider sending out cart abandonment emails, but don’t send your first reminder out until at least one hour after the cart’s creation since it’ll come off as too pushy. Similarly, don’t wait one full day or longer; otherwise, it’ll lead to low conversion rates.
Cost of Goods Sold
To better understand profit, clearly outline your costs. Your costs of goods sold or COGS is another WooCommerce metrics system that looks at all production expenses, including the price of materials, manufacturing labor, commission for those on your team pushing sales, and advertisements that draw customers to you.
While these necessary factors introduce your products to potential buyers and increase traffic to your landing pages, they prove costly, sometimes keeping sellers from turning a profit. Rather than let that happen to you, determine the number of goods sold by combining your beginning product quantity and additional material purchases and subtracting your remaining inventory from that amount.
From there, get the COGS by multiplying that sold inventory number by the costs of the individual products.
Gross and Net Profit
COGS only looks at the funds that go into creating sold products, but since these products involve an investment, track how much money they turn over by calculating your gross profit. Subtract the COGS from total sales and use this number to determine whether you have high or low profits for your current sales period compared to your average profit margin.
If low, determine where you can cut corners without jeopardizing style or quality. For instance, if some marketing tactics fail to drive traffic, don’t waste funds where it doesn’t count.
Gross profit proves ideal for uncovering your income on these items but doesn’t accurately depict total store earnings. Instead, your net profit takes all buying and selling into consideration, including space rental, administrative costs, insurance, general marketing strategies, and other regular business expenses. Compute your net profit by subtracting gross profit from taxes and operating expenses.
No One Beats the Bear!
As fun as Google analytics and statistical examination may sound, it gets confusing, especially if you don’t know where to begin your research on plugins or how to track your returning customer or cart abandonment rates. After all, when you signed up for an eCommerce shop, you just wanted to sell your merchandise.
At Bear North Digital, our Wisconsin-based remote team works closely with you when growing your WooCommerce website. Our digital strategists, who do everything from AB testing to ad campaigns and website design, are our greatest assets. For SEO tools and a high understanding of WooCommerce metrics, call (218) 216-8692 or fill out our online form and get a free growth plan today!