The dmi guide to ecommerce

Key Metrics to Track and Review

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Time on site. Average amount of time in minutes that a user 

spends on your site. Studies have shown that the longer  

a user spent on the site, the more likely they are to convert  

into a paying customer. 

 

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Average product cost. It’s important to also look at your average 

amount earned per product, after taking into consideration any 

discounts. This could help you ensure that your profit margins are 

remaining healthy. 

 

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Average cart abandon rate. This percentage is how many of your 

website users are adding items to an online shopping cart but not 

completing a purchase. Ideally, you’d want this percentage to be 

as low as possible. 

 

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Average CTR for any marketing (email, social). What is the 

average click-through rate (CTR) for any of the marketing that 

you’re doing; as with looking at your traffic sources, this lets you 

know if your marketing is paying off. For instance, if you see that 

you generate more sales through email then social media, it may 

be a better use of your time to focus more on email, especially 

if you feel like your social media presence has already been 

optimized. 

 

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Promo and coupon code use. It’s crucial to track how often any 

promo or coupon codes are used on your site. Not only will this 

help you see which sources with coupon codes are sending 

paying customers to your site (so you can consider working with 

them more in the future), but also to identify the popular specific 

promotions or customers. This could include testing different 

types of discounts, such as a discount by percentage or by 

monetary value. 

 

 

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New vs. returning customers.

 Look at what percentage  

of your customer base comprises new customers versus  

how many are returning customers. This can tell you a lot about 

customer loyalty and how often people are buying your products 

again. You’ll gain a good sense of the purchasing pattern of your 

customers so you can reliably predict lifetime value. 

 

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Customer lifetime value. 

Customer lifetime value is the average 

dollar amount of a customer who uses and buys things from 

your website over their lifetime. This is usually calculated by the 

average order rate of return customers and their order frequency, 

as well as a few other factors you need to track on each site 

(such as product life). 

It’s important to note that you should look at many of these metrics  

on a channel, device and location level rather than all site averages.  

If you see an average conversion rate of 0.5% for the full website,  

a deeper look might reveal that Desktop conversion rate is 2%,  

UK conversion rate is 3% and organic search conversion rate is 6%.  

Lots of social media traffic or mobile traffic will drop your average  

conversion rate down so it’s important to view this and other  

metrics across channels, locations and devices to see where  

your conversion hot spots are and prioritize these areas. Likewise,  

you can pull back your investment or modify your strategy in areas 

where you are less successful.

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For the most part many ecommerce business owners prefer to look  

at report information monthly. For a site that does a large volume of 

orders, looking at metrics weekly may also be a good idea in order to 

spot potential trends or declines as they’re happening. For any reports 

that you do, make sure to include a summary of key takeaways that  

can be easily scanned before getting into the detailed data. Often, we 

can get so far into the weeds with our own data, we don’t understand 

how it can translate to someone else to best comprehend it. 

“Lots of social media traffic or mobile traffic 

will drop your average conversion rate down 

so it’s important to view this and other  

metrics across channels, locations and 

devices to see where your conversion hot 

spots are and prioritize these areas.”

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