In today’s fast-paced digital age, the roles and responsibilities of brand marketers are constantly changing. But this evolution is perhaps even more pronounced during times of uncertainty, which we all currently find ourselves in.
The customer journey has been changing steadily over the last several years, causing a convergence of brand marketing and eCommerce initiatives. This relationship has only deepened during the COVID-19 pandemic.
As your role evolves, it is critical that you pay attention to the right mix of eCommerce metrics to ensure that you have access to the data you need to make smart decisions about future campaigns.
What eCommerce metrics should I track?
When it comes to eCommerce, there’s a seemingly never-ending amount of metrics you can track. But not all data is the same, and you don’t want to get weighed down by the minutiae.
Generally speaking, the metrics you should spend time tracking will fall into the following three categories.
1. Platform metrics
Platform metrics track how well your campaigns are doing on specific channels—like Google, Pinterest, and Facebook.
When it comes to platform metrics, you’ll need to keep track of things like:
Impressions: The number of times your ads are shown and appear on someone’s screen
Video views: The number of times your video starts playing
Clickthrough rate: The percentage of people who saw your ad and proceeded to click on it
Cost-per-click: How much money it’s costing your organization to generate clicks on your ads
2. Landing page metrics
Landing page metrics gauge how effective your landing pages are in eliciting the desired action from consumers. Here are some of the landing page metrics you’ll want to keep tabs on:
Engagement rate: This metric measures how effective your landing page is. It is the percentage of people who completed the desired action on that page (ie. collect email, add to cart, read reviews, enter a contest, etc.). By extension, you should also look at the bounce rate, or percentage of people who exit without further engagement.
Purchase intent rate: The percentage of visitors who add something to their cart when they hit your landing page
Conversion rate: The percentage of visitors who complete the desired goal out of the total number of visitors
Return on investment: This metric ties your ad to your landing page, comparing what you spent on the ad to the sales driven by the landing page.
3. Checkout metrics
You can’t optimize your checkout process unless you know what’s happening when customers complete the purchase process.
To do that, you need to track the following checkout metrics:
Average basket size: The average number of units the consumer had in their basket upon checkout
Average order value: The average amount of money spent per order
Average unit price: The average price of each individual unit in the consumer’s cart, which can include other brands’ products as well
Total reported revenue: The total amount of sales revenue generated
Total reported units sold: The total number of individual units sold
Purchase intent: The metric that ties all eCommerce analytics together
As you can see, there are many eCommerce metrics to track—so many that it might be hard to stay on top of some of them, which can make it more difficult to see the big picture.
This is why it’s so important to track purchase intent. Purchase intent measures how ready your audience was to make a purchase when they came across your creative and how effective your messaging and targeting were to encourage the desired behavior.
When you measure purchase intent, you can figure out whether your digital strategy is working. What audiences were targeted? Were you effective in your targeting? Based on all of this data, you can continue to optimize your campaigns to deliver consumer-first shopping experiences that catch your audience at the right time and in the right place.
Tracking purchase intent also enables brands to optimize their checkout metrics by focusing on things like basket building, more effective inventory management, and reducing shopping cart abandonment rates.
As more and more brands are pausing their social media campaigns to combat hate, tracking purchase intent becomes even more important because it enables you to figure out where to focus additional ad spend, which channels will be most effective, and where consumers prefer to shop, among other things. For example, you might find out that video ads on Pinterest help drive the most revenue. Armed with that information, you might decide to invest in more video marketing campaigns and increase your paid Pinterest budget.
By tracking purchase intent, you ensure that you aren’t looking at the other eCommerce metrics in a silo, making it easier to make the smartest decisions about future campaigns.
Tracking purchase intent and other eCommerce metrics with MikMak
Research suggests brands have just 1.5 seconds to spark purchase intent before consumers move on to the next thing.
MikMak enables you to make the most out of that moment with a single platform loaded with the tools, insights, and channel and retailer integrations that you need to convert consumers.
Schedule a demo today to see how MikMak can help you overcome your marketing blindspots using eCommerce analytics—and grow your bottom line because of it.
