Every eCommerce website owner should know that getting and retaining visitors is not magic, and marketing efforts can go as far as leading prospects to an eCommerce site, but what can be done once visitors are inside the site?
Common sense should tell you right away that having a great template, interface design, good looking product pages and a streamlined user experience is a no brainer for keeping visitors interested.
What about consumer behavior? What happens after you acquire visitors? What do they do on your site? What can you do to keep them longer? How much time do they spend on your site? Where do they go after they have been on your site, and how many times a month do they come to it?
That is why once your site has acquired a visitor it is important to follow up with engagement strategies to help you convert your visitors into customers or subscribers.
In this chapter you will learn about the most important metrics you will need to pay attention to in order to implement proper engagement strategies, and the tools that will help you to track and analyze consumer behavior.
Tracking engagement
When tracking engagement, you will need to analyze a visitor’s behavior inside your site. Tracking engagement will mostly help you to improve your eCommerce website’s design and to enhance user experience inside of it.
One of the most basic engagement metrics to analyze is the “bounce rate”. It refers to the number of visitors that bounce out of your site after seeing just one page instead of continuing to other pages.
One very important metric is the “buy to detail”. It is the rate at which a product is sold just after visitors check its description and details, without checking other products to make comparisons, so you can learn which products are potential best sellers.
Another critical metric to consider is “cart abandonment rate”, which is the number of times customers add products to the cart, but do not complete the checkout process. This is important to analyze, so you can see what is causing this cart abandonment issue and how to reduce it.
Other cart related metrics include “adds to cart” which refers to products added to the cart, “removes from cart”, which are the products that are continually removed before checkout, and “product checkouts”, which are the products that are kept until checkout is complete.
The “conversion rate” talks about the number of visitors that end up converting into customers. What it took for them to convert? How did they decide? What products are making people sign up? That’s what you need to analyze.
Measuring conversion
By measuring conversion, or in other words, tracking your customers spending habits on your eCommerce site, you will be able to measure the impact visitors converting into customers are having on your online business.
These metrics will help you measure the real value that customers put on certain products, how good current marketing methods are for converting, who are the customers providing the most value for the company and the overall performance of your online operation.
The “average order value” is one of the most important conversion metrics to pay attention to. It will tell you a lot about the average volume and value of a sale on your site, and at the same time about what kind of customers make those orders.
This can lead you directly to a metric known as “unique purchases”, which refers to the number of times that a product or combination of products is purchased, which should give you a good idea for creating a discount or promotion for a product or set.
“Product revenue” is directly tied to the last two because it refers to the revenue generated by a particular product or set of products. This can help you to better manage inventories of certain products in demand by existing customers.
Long term measures
Metrics classified as long term measures are those that will help you better understand your existing customers, how to retain them to make you the most profit, those that are engaged with your brand or product, and to keep business sustainable as a result.
“New customers to repeat customer ratio” is a metric that measures revenue coming from new customers and revenue coming from repeating customers by comparing how active they are on your site and how much money is coming from each group.
This metric can help you see what is making repeat customers stay and how you can implement that to make sure your new customers stay. Even if new visitors and daily traffic make up the bulk of activity on your site, the greatest profits normally come from repeating customers.
You have to really care for your existing customers. You have to pay special attention to the “customer lifetime value” metric, which refers to those customers with the potential to become long term assets.
“Customer lifetime value” can be measured by tracking those customers that have made more than one purchase in a determined period of time. Said period of time should depend on the type and pricing of the products that they purchase.
By finding these lifetime customers and thoroughly tracking and analyzing those metrics, you’re guaranteeing yourself eCommerce success. The following tools will help you track and analyze those metrics intelligently.
Google Analytics is the most popular and most widely used analytics platform for eCommerce. It gives you features like data consolidation, data analytics and reporting, and data activation. It will give you insights on how your visitors find and use your site and on how to keep them coming back.
To start using it for your eCommerce site, you will only need to sign up for free, register your site on the analytics platform, embed the tracking code given to you by Google in your website’s code, and in the following hours you will be able to start learning about your audience!
RetentionGrid
RetentionGrid is an eCommerce analytics software which is best known for its simplicity. RetentionGrid will give you all the analytics data in easy to understand graph form, which will make it easier for you to create and implement proper segmentation strategies!
