How to choose your KPI’s

There are tons of KPI’s that you can track and follow and it can be challenging to monitor them all so use these guidelines as a general rule as to what you need to be aware of.

• Business Goals - choose KPI that will directly impact your overarching goals.

• Easily Measurable - make all KPI’s SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timebound) 

• Growth stage of your business - choose KPI’s that are relevant to your business size. A smaller business will have different goals to a bigger business.

• Keep it relevant and short- do not try to track everything for the sake of it. Just track what you need and is important to you. 

We recommend that you include these 3 KPI’s in your reporting - as they can often get forgotten about but are some of the most important ones.

Competitors

Being competitive in your industry is really important. You need to look at the industry leaders and see how you compare. What do they do that makes them more successful? Monitoring pricing strategies is a good way of comparing how you measure up.

We recommend selecting a product from each of your main product categories and running a regular competitor analysis (monthly would be a good place to start with this). The average percentage difference can then be reviewed. 

Basket Abandonment Rate 

Basket abandonment is when customers add products to their basket but then fail to complete and pay for the items. 87.4% of all ecommerce baskets were abandoned during 2021. 

While some basket abandonment will always happen, it can pinpoint issues with your checkout process if it's consistently happening and must be looked at in more detail. 

You can measure this in a few different ways: either exit rate of your basket page, or tracking the number of ‘add-to-basket’ button clicks and dividing this by your total website traffic amount. 

Remember to look at all paths through the checkout, including the quick-basket function where customers can effectively ‘skip’ the basket page. 

Email Sign Up Conversion Rate

Traditional old-school email marketing remains an important channel for many eCommerce retailers and usually can account for up to 20% of total revenue. Therefore it is important to ensure your list of email addresses continues to grow over time. 

An important KPI to measure is how many customers are creating an account (post purchase) and how many are subscribing to receive your marketing emails. 

A well-tested strategy is to use campaign activity (like an extra 10% off your sale campaign) if a customer signs up

For more useful information on best practice for your eCommerce performance reporting - please download our whitepaper here which includes the best metrics to include, how to streamline your reports and case studies.