I recently got the chance to do a consulting job for an e-commerce company to help with the to-be customer journey design. This was my first experience with an e-commerce business, and I gladly took this up as a learning opportunity.
Here are the metrics that I found the head of Growth peering over every day. Note that this particular online shop is predominantly an ad-driven model that drives traffic to their site.
- No of impressions: No of times the product ads were served and viewed by a prospective customer
- Click-through rate: Percentage of times a prospect clicked on the ads.
- Cost per click: Cost per click= cost to serve impressions divided by the number of clicks on the ad
- Abandonment rate - This number is closely watched and is the bane of all e-commerce stores. Number of customers who load their shopping cart and due to various reasons do not carry on to make the payments. Shops offer zero shipping fees, social proof, use payment badges with smooth checkout flows.
- Conversions rate: Number of orders placed divided by the number of visitors to the site.
On the other hand, WIMO is the most crucial metric for the customer- "Where is my order?" Ultimately that's what matters!
