Owning an e-commerce website may not win you a place in the commercial centre. One of the significant aspects of improving an e-commerce website is optimizing the site for search results. The major phase involved is to measure the bottom-line impact of the search engine optimization (SEO) program. The SEO drives higher numbers of qualified visitors to make a business deal. In this regard, Key Performance Indicators (KPI) forms the top-line data points which determine the success of the SEO program. The attributes involved are visits, orders, and the revenue generated. Every other data forms a direction or diagnostic point. The revenue data measures even the profit and other integrated business drivers.
Knowing the factors to be measured would ensure the need of change or review for improvement which is critical for the growth of an e-commerce business. Identifying the right KPIs for a particular business is essential as it changes depending on the specific factors of a company. Though all the data is available through Google Analytics, a few key insights is enough to know the performance. Choosing the right KPIs matters the most for an e-commerce business. There is no particular stepwise process to choose the apt ones, but there are certain things that must be considered always.
The first step is to define the objective which is followed by the linking of the KPIs to the defined objectives. It is found that for most of the businesses four to ten KPIs would work wonders. The focus must be on a few key metrics as less is more always. For instance, a KPI could be related with the objective of increasing sales, improve ROI, improve customer service, and, etc. Some of the e-commerce goals and its related KPIs are briefed below.
Boost sales in the next quarter: The KPIs are site traffic, daily sales, and conversion rate.
Increase conversion rate in the next year: The KPIs are rate of shopping cart abandonment, trends in the shipping rate, trends in competition, conversion rate, and, etc.
Increase site traffic in the next year: The KPIs include the traffic of the site, sources of traffic, promotional click-through rates, bounce rates, and social shares.
Reduce customer service calls (by percent) in months (pre-defined number): The KPIs include service call satisfaction, identify the page visited prior to the call, or an event that leads to a call.
Analyzing KPI Data
Segmentation of the data as much as possible (like email, blog, content, PPC, and, etc. for conversion rate) plays a significant role. An insight into the online orders, sales, and, etc., form the most important data that guide the decisions to be made about SEO. Tracking of e-commerce through web analytics must be of a higher priority and each business person must enable it. Once the data is collected, an excel sheet must be created to enter the data downloaded from the web analytics page. The performance of the current month over the same month in the previous year forms a strong measure as it removes the seasonality. Then, a chart is created showing the trend of the performance for current month over the last years. For instance, visits from November 2014, 15, 16, and so forth. The same reports are created for orders, revenues and other essential factors that could be overlaid in a single graph.
However, one must be cautious about bad key performance indicators and avoid them. Generally, there is a tendency to work on the readily available metrics which should be avoided. Some of the bad KPIs are page views, Twitter followers, Facebook fans, time on site, sent e-mails, and, etc.
The business must focus on conversion rate, average order value, card abandonment rate, visitor loyalty, task completion rate, and Magento Audit service. Focus on business goals and its appropriate KPIs, re-evaluate of KPIs every few months brings in the anticipated results for any e-commerce store.
