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
Learn what your customers are actually doing instead of just guessing
One of the best ways to build a sustainable business starts by getting your customers to come back. Mastering that simple process can be difficult, but builds a lifelong business.
Repeat Customer Insights can help you understand your customer's behavior. With its collection of behavior reports, you can see what they're actually doing instead of guessing and having your efforts fall flat.