How much money did you make this week? How many sales do you make per month? What are the most profitable traffic sources? It can be challenging to stay on top of everything in an e-commerce business because there is so much to manage.
An e-commerce dashboard will centralise all of your important data and keep your entire team on the same page while providing you with a quick overview of your business. As a result, you’ll be able to make sure you’re meeting your goals and discovering new possibilities.
There is no one-size-fits-all solution. Depending on various factors, such as product categories, target audience, stage of development (new or existing brand), and business goals, one company’s dashboard will look substantially different from another’s. However, there are a few key “blanket” KPI measures to consider when creating your dashboard.
What is an E-commerce Dashboard, and How Does it Work?
A centralised system that displays performance information across predetermined periods is known as an e-commerce analytics dashboard. They provide deep insights into your custom e-commerce store and deliver essential information through personalised data visualisation. In addition, they give you the option of selecting which KPIs to track and how the data is displayed.
E-commerce analytics dashboards are a necessary part of any e-commerce store since they allow you to monitor and evaluate your performance by analysing patterns. These metrics will enable you to assess your performance and make appropriate changes to your store or marketing efforts.
The dashboard can display all you need to know about your online store at a glance, including:
- What kind of traffic you get (and where it comes from).
- Your sales and revenue figures.
- The most important traffic sources for you.
Choose your e-commerce KPI metrics carefully since they will affect your ability to track business performance. Choose metrics that will allow you to understand each step a consumer takes before a transaction and how effective your efforts to achieve company goals are by combining customer-centric data and common sense.
While there are several metrics to track, a few can be used as a starting point. Analyse each one to discover the dashboard elements for your company:
Benefits of Data Visualisation
Marketers may use data visualisation technologies to access and evaluate data in real-time, allowing them to make more educated decisions faster. A digital dashboard allows key players in a business to keep track of many aspects of the company while also capturing the organisation’s overall performance.
There are numerous advantages to adopting data visualisation tools, but the following are the most significant:
- Accessing information quickly
- Pattern recognition
- Identifying trends
- Identifying the variables that have an impact on customer behaviour
- Predicting sales volumes
How to Make the Most of E-commerce Dashboard
What you track on your e-commerce marketing dashboard will ultimately be determined by your objectives. Therefore, it’s best to build a separate dashboard to monitor performance if you’re tracking a specific campaign. Still, it’s best to track a combination of social media, sales, and online traffic for day-to-day activity.
Because brand discovery is critical to identifying marketing opportunities, traffic sources are vital to monitoring an e-commerce marketing dashboard. If any of your leads come from recommendations, for example, you might want to try rewarding current customers for referring new ones.
This type of information is crucial when considering budget allocation and the best ways to acquire, engage, and keep clients. Continue reading to find out how to get the most out of your e-commerce dashboard.
1. Web Traffic Sources
The Web Traffic Sources stat identifies which traffic sources are bringing visitors to your site and compares them. Direct, referral and search are the three primary traffic sources, while your website may also receive traffic via campaigns such as banner ads or paid search. Consider assessing the number of goal completions from each traffic source in addition to tracking the number of visits from each traffic source.
You can examine each source of traffic to obtain more detailed information about your website’s traffic. For example, you can analyse search traffic according to associated keyword rankings and landing pages. You can further evaluate referral traffic based on blog mentions, service listings, or social referrals. It is best practice to prioritise this metric on your dashboard.
2. Total Sales
You’ll want to learn more about what’s driving your sales numbers and why. Pay attention to the performance of each of your sales channels over time. To better grasp any patterns, break down a few months’ worth of sales data into a daily review.
Keep an eye on daily and weekly data trends – do sales increase at certain times of the year? If that’s the case, study the traffic source and see if anything unusual happens on those days. This data will help you focus on activities that will improve your marketing approach.
3. Sales Conversion Rates
This is calculated by dividing the total number of sales by the total number of sessions to your store.
This statistic is crucial for understanding how much traffic is required to achieve your sales goals.
However, conversion rates, like sales figures, require a more detailed understanding.
Here are some crucial points to consider while analysing your conversion rate metric:
- Set the conversion rate for each channel, such as AdWords, SEO, Facebook, and so on.
- Set the conversion rate for each product category: Some categories may convert faster than others.
- Determine the conversion rate for each campaign: If you’re dealing with affiliates or influencers, for example,
- Aim to improve your campaign’s sales conversion rates. If a channel or category performs well, consider investing more in it; if something is underperforming, consider whether a solution could improve the rates or discontinue the campaign.
4. Refund and Return Rate
For e-commerce companies, refund and return rates can be a nightmare. Even high-profit online stores can be severely hit by high refund and return rates. Returns may be expected and already accounted for in your financial models, or they may be infrequent, depending on your industry.
Returns can also be a strong motivator for shoppers to click the “purchase now” button. Customers who are aware that your store offers free returns or exchanges are less likely to experience buyer’s remorse. Returns and refunds should be used to promote your business rather than sabotage you.
In any case, keeping track of these figures is critical to the success of your business. For example, is there a section of your store where your return rate is exceptionally high? It may be time to look into where it’s coming from.
5. Email Subscription Rate
Given the high value of email marketing, it’s critical to know what percentage of your visitors have opted-in to your email list. This communicates to you that your customers WANT to hear from you. That is, of course, a good thing.
Need to improve your subscription rate?
On the other hand, the number of unsubscribes is just as crucial as new subscriptions. If large numbers of your users are unsubscribing from your emails, it’s time to rethink your strategy. Unsubscribes will always happen, but it’s critical to keep them to a minimum, aiming for less than 0.5 per cent (and less than .25 per cent is great).
6. Shopping Cart and Checkout Abandonment Rate
Abandonment may be measured in a variety of ways; it helps determine site behaviour. For example, shopping cart abandonment refers to the number of customers who add something to their cart and leave your site without purchasing anything. This check is necessary to see whether there are any issues with the site or the cart processes before proceeding to the checkout.
Similarly, checkout abandonment is an important metric that measures how many customers leave your site without making a purchase but only after starting the checkout process. While shopping cart abandonment is comparable, it’s crucial to measure them individually to see whether the checkout process is the core reason for abandonment or if the issue is something else entirely.
Intuitive cart management, which includes persistent pages, urgency messaging, and saving users’ carts, can help reduce abandonment rates.
7. Customer Retention Rate
The percentage of consumers you keep as customers over time is best defined as your retention rate. The higher this score is, the better you are at serving your customers. When calculating this, remember to remove your NEW customers from the total number of customers. New consumers are vital, but the focus of this metric is on how effectively you keep existing clients.
Make adequate investments in good customer service, loyalty programs, repeat purchase marketing, and a good investment in customer satisfaction to boost your client retention rate. As a company that prioritises excellent customer service, we can confidently tell you that it works 100%.
8. Best Performing Products
This is another metric to keep an eye on to maximise your e-commerce dashboard. We recommend a table of the top ten best-selling products, sorted by revenue or number of items sold. Depending on the frequency of your reports, you’ll be able to tell if you’re selling the most profitable products on a weekly or monthly basis.
There are many brands and suppliers in most e-commerce stores. This means that certain products have a low profit margin while others have a high profit margin. As a result, you must either organically or through sponsored promotion promote the most profitable products on your e-commerce site. You’ll know if you’re turning over the right products if you set this up on your eCommerce dashboard and pay attention to it.
9. Average Order Value
When a consumer puts an order on a website or through a mobile app, AOV keeps track of the average dollar amount spent. Divide total revenue by the number of orders to find your company’s average order value.
To measure overall performance and identify how to enhance revenue growth, the AOV is frequently used in conjunction with e-commerce KPI metrics like CR and Revenue Per Visit (RPV).
Because of the enormous potential for growth and the low cost of getting it, AOV is a great tool to optimize. You can better plan pricing and marketing activities that can significantly influence your bottom line if you have a target AOV in mind.
You can try a variety of strategies to boost your AOV based on your findings. Take Amazon, for example. They provide free shipping but at a cost. Their AOV aims and consumers’ desire for free shipping are both addressed by establishing a minimum spend-per-order. Cross-selling and upselling are also effective ways to boost AOV.
10. Cost Per Lead
When producing new leads for your sales team, the cost per Lead metric gauges how cost-effective your marketing strategies are. A lead is a person who has completed a goal and indicated an interest in your product or service. This indicator is linked to other important business KPIs like the cost of acquiring new consumers. The purpose of CPL is to provide your marketing team with a monetary figure so they can estimate how much money they should spend on generating new leads.
The cost per Lead metric also gives valuable information for calculating your return on marketing investment. In reality, equivalent metrics, such as cost per visitor and cost per purchase, should be associated with each stage of the purchase funnel. You can also use these metrics to track individual campaigns, such as AdWords, banner advertisements, or social ads, as well as the overall effectiveness of your marketing activities.
Master Your Dashboard Metrics
Knowing the data on your e-commerce dashboard listed above will help you determine how well you’re performing those activities and find areas where you can enhance your strategies and tactics to boost your store’s performance and bottom line.
The sooner you maximise your e-commerce dashboard, the faster you’ll be able to improve your marketing strategies and go ahead of the competition.
Your organisation can stay focused on what matters and address issues more quickly if you have the right e-commerce KPI metrics in place.
