Yesterday I wrote about watching over the right metrics and how that can help detect problems before they get too large (assuming you act on the metrics which I procrastinated on).
When you run a Shopify store there are 100s of metrics you can track. Here's a few that I'd recommend for every store:
- Total sales
- Net profit
- Traffic (sessions)
- Order volume
Additional metrics can be watched depending on what strategies were being executed. As you start/stop those strategies, you'd also start/stop watching over the metrics associated with them.
Improving organic sales.
- Organic traffic
- Organic conversion rate (or bounce rate)
- Sales from organic customers as percentage of total sales
Improving conversion rates.
- Session conversion rates
- Product page conversion rates
- Product page bounce times
- Add to cart rate
- Checkout completion rate
Any kind of advertising.
- Ad traffic
- Ad conversion rate
- Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI)
- Winner/loser and A/B testing ads
Improving retention and customer loyalty.
- Overall repeat purchase rate
- 1st to 2nd order repeat purchase rate
- Average customer purchase latency for first five orders
The metrics you watch should be tailored for what you're focusing on. You can collect all of them if it's easy or automatic but there should be only a few you actively care about. It wouldn't make much sense to worry about organic traffic levels if you've been focused on ads for the last six months.
Shopify and Google Analytics can collect some of these for you. Repeat Customer Insights will collect many of the various retention and loyalty metrics.
Eric Davis
See how the month a customer orders will change their behavior
Repeat Customer Insights will automatically group your customers into cohorts based on when they first purchased. This will let you see how the date customers bought would impact their behavior.