Performance should inform business decisions, and KPIs should drive actions.
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are milestones on the road to online retail success. Monitoring them will help ecommerce entrepreneurs identify progress toward sales, marketing, and customer service goals.
Your KPIs should be chosen and monitored based on your specific business goals, but having an understanding of as many KPIs as possible can be beneficial. Certain KPIs support some goals while they’re irrelevant for others.
In this guide, we’ll cover important ecommerce metrics you should measure and give you examples on what KPIs you should track, and how to track them in Shopify.
Table of Contents
- What is a performance indicator?
- What is a key performance indicator?
- Why are key performance indicators important?
- Types of key performance indicators
- 70 key performance indicator examples for ecommerce
- How do I create a KPI?
Here is the definition of key performance indicators, types of key performance indicators, and 67 examples of ecommerce key performance indicators.
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What is a performance indicator?
A performance indicator is aquantifiable measurementor data point used to gauge performance relative to some goal. As an example, some online retailers may have a goal to increase site traffic 50% in the next year.
Relative to this goal, a performance indicator might be the number of unique visitors the site receives daily or which traffic sources send visitors (paid advertising, search engine optimization, brand or display advertising, a YouTube video, etc.) For some businesses, customer lifetime value is the most important KPI to track.
For others, customer satisfaction or customer acquisition cost is the main focus for business growth. Although most businesses will have multiple KPI's to focus on, you don’t want to spread yourself too thin. Just like with setting personal goals, having two to three areas of focus is key.
What is a key performance indicator?
For most goals there could be many performance indicators—often too many—so often people narrow it down to just two or three impactful data points, known as key performance indicators. KPIs are those measurements that most accurately and succinctly show whether or not a business is progressing toward its goal.
TIP:Use Shopify's built-inreporting and analyticshelp you make better decisions, faster. Choose from over 60 pre-built dashboards and reports or customize your own to spot trends, capitalize on opportunities, and supercharge your decision-making.
Why are KPIs Important?
KPIs are important just like strategy and goal setting are important. Without KPIs, it’s difficult to gauge progress over time. You’d be making decisions based on gut instinct, personal preference or belief, or other unfounded hypotheses. KPIs tell you more information about your business and your customers, so you can make informed and strategic decisions.
But KPIs aren’t important on their own. The real value lies in the actionable insights you take away from analyzing the data. You’ll be able to more accurately devise strategies to drive more online sales, as well as understand where there may be problems in your business.
Plus, the data related to KPIs can be distributed to the larger team. This can be used to educate your employees and come together for critical problem-solving.
Types of key performance indicators
There are many types of key performance indicators. They may be qualitative, quantitative, predictive of the future, or revealing of the past. KPIs also touch on various business operations. When it comes to ecommerce, KPIs generally fall into one of the following five categories:
- Sales
- Marketing
- Customer service
- Manufacturing
- Project management
70 key performance indicator examples for ecommerce
Note: The performance indicators listed below are in no way an exhaustive list. There are an almost infinite number of KPIs to consider for your ecommerce business.
- What are key performance indicators for sales?
- What are key performance indicators for marketing?
- What are key performance indicators for customer service?
- What are key performance indicators for manufacturing?
- What are key performance indicators for project management?
What are KPIs for sales?
Sales KPIs are measures that tell you how your business is doing in terms of conversions and revenue. You can look at sales KPIs related to a specific channel, time period, team, employee, etc. to inform business decisions.
TIP:Go to yourAnalytics dashboardin Shopify admin to see these sales KPIs and track progress towards your goals.
Examples of important ecommerce metrics and KPIs for sales include:
- Sales:Ecommerce retailers can monitor total sales by the hour, day, week, month, quarter, or year.
- Average order size:Sometimes called the average market basket, the average order size tells you how much a customer typically spends on a single order.
- Gross profit:Calculate this KPI by subtracting the total cost of goods sold from total sales.
- Average margin:Average margin, or average profit margin, is a percentage that represents yourprofit marginover a period of time.
- Average order value (AOV):The average value of an order from your customers.
- Number of transactions:这是the total number of transactions. Use this KPI in conjunction with average order size or total number of site visitors for deeper insights.
- Conversion rate:The conversion rate, also a percentage, is the rate at which users on your ecommerce site are converting (or buying). This is calculated by dividing the total number of visitors (to a site, page, category, or selection of pages) by the total number of conversions.
- Shopping cart abandonment rate:The shopping cart abandonment rate tells you how many users are adding products to their shopping cart but not checking out. The lower this number, the better. If your cart abandonment rate is high, there may be too much friction in the checkout process.
- New customer orders versus returning customer orders:This metric shows a comparison between new and repeat customers. Many business owners focus only on customer acquisition, but customer retention can also drive loyalty, word of mouth marketing, and higher order values.
- Cost of goods sold (COGS):COGStells you how much you’re spending to sell a product. This includes manufacturing, employee wages, and overhead costs.
- Total available market relative to a retailer’s share of market:Tracking this KPI will tell you how much your business is growing compared to others within your industry.
- Product affinity:This KPI tells you which products are purchased together. This can and should inform cross-promotion strategies.
- Product relationship:这是which products are viewed consecutively. Again, use this KPI to formulate effective cross-selling tactics.
- Inventory levels:This KPI could tell you how much stock is on hand, how long product is sitting, how quickly product is selling, etc.
- Competitive pricing:It’s important to gauge your success and growth against yourself and against your competitors. Monitor your competitors’ pricing strategies and compare them to your own.
- Customer lifetime value (CLV):The CLV tells you how much a customer is worth to your business over the course of their relationship with your brand. You want to increase this number over time through strengthening relationships and focusing on customer loyalty.
- Revenue per visitor (RPV):RPV gives you an average of how much a person spends during a single visit to your site. If this KPI is low, you can view website analytics to see how you can drive more online sales.
- Churn rate:For an online retailer, the churn rate tells you how quickly customers are leaving your brand or canceling/failing to renew a subscription with your brand.
- Customer acquisition cost (CAC):CAC tells you how much your company spends on acquiring a new customer. This is measured by looking at your marketing spend and how it breaks down per individual customer.
What are KPIs for marketing?
KPIs for marketing tell you how well you’re doing in relation to your marketing and advertising goals. These also impact your sales KPIs.
如果你运行一个电子商务商店,您可以使用市场ob欧宝娱乐app下载地址ing KPIs to understand which products are selling, who’s buying them, how they’re buying them, and why they’re buying them. This can help you market more strategically in the future, write betterproduct descriptions, and inform product development.
TIP:Go to yourAnalytics dashboardin Shopify admin to track marketing KPIs and ensure you’re hitting your objectives.
Examples of KPIs you can use for marketing include:
- Website traffic:Site traffic refers to the total number of visits to your ecommerce site. More site traffic means more users are hitting your store.
- New visitors versus returning visitors:New site visitors are first-time visitors to your site. Returning visitors, on the other hand, have been to your site before. While looking at this metric alone won’t reveal much, it can help ecommerce retailers gauge success of digital marketing campaigns. If you’re running a retargeted ad, for example, returning visitors should be higher.
- Time on site:该KPI告诉您多少时间游客是口头的ding on your website. Generally, more time spent means they’ve had deeper engagements with your brand. Usually, you’ll want to see more time spent on blog content and landing pages and less time spent through the checkout process.
- Bounce rate:The bounce rate tells you how many users exit your site after viewing only one page. If this number is high, you’ll want to investigate why visitors are leaving your site instead of exploring.
- Page views per visit:Page views per visit refers to the average number of pages a user will view on your site during each visit. Again, more pages usually means more engagement. However, if it’s taking users too many clicks to find the products they’re looking for, you want to revisit your site design.
- 平均会话持续时间:The average amount of time a person spends on your site during a single visit is called the average session duration.
- Traffic source:The traffic source KPI tells you where visitors are coming from or how they found your site. This will provide information about which channels are driving the most traffic, such as organic search, paid ads, or social media.
- Mobile site traffic:Monitor the total number of users who use mobile devices to access your store and make sure your site is optimized for mobile.
- Day part monitoring:Looking at when site visitors come can tell you which are peak traffic times.
- Newsletter subscribers:The number of newsletter subscribers refers to how many users have opted into your email marketing list. If you have more subscribers, you can reach more consumers. However, you’ll also want to look at related data, such as the demographics of your newsletter subscribers, to make sure you’re reaching your target audience.
- Texting subscribers:Newer to digital marketing than email, ecommerce brands can reach consumers through SMS-based marketing. Texting subscribers refers to the number of customers on your text message contact list.
- Subscriber growth rate:This tells you how quickly your subscriber list is growing. Pairing this KPI with the total number of subscribers will give you good insight into this channel.
- Email open rate:This KPI tells you the percentage of subscribers that open your email. If you have a low email open rate, you could test new subject lines, or try cleaning your list for inactive or irrelevant subscribers.
- Email click-through rate (CTR):While the open rate tells you the percentage of subscribers who open the email, the click-through rate tells you the percentage of those who actually clicked on a link after opening. This is arguably more important than the open rate because without clicks, you won’t drive any traffic to your site.
- Unsubscribes:You can look at both the total number and the rate of unsubscriptions for your email list.
- Chat sessions initiated:如果你有ecomme即时聊天功能rce store using a tool likeShopify Inbox, the number of chat sessions initiated tells you how many users engaged with the tool to speak to a virtual aide.
- Social followers and fans:Whether you’re on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, or Snapchat (or a combination of a few), the number of followers or fans you have is a useful KPI to gauge customer loyalty and brand awareness. Many of those social media networks also have tools that ecommerce businesses can use to learn more about their social followers.
- Return on ad spend (ROAS):if you’re running ad campaigns, ROAS tells you the amount of revenue earned for every dollarspenton advertising on a specific channel like Google or Facebook.
- Blended ROAS:this metric blends how much you spend on ads across all channels to give you a broader view of how efficiently your ad campaigns generate revenue.
- Cost per click (CPC):Also known as pay-per-click, this KPI tells you how much you spend each time a potential customer clicks on one of your paid ads on Google, Facebook, or other channels.
- Social media engagement:Social media engagement tells you how actively your followers and fans are interacting with your brand on social media.
- Clicks:The total number of clicks a link gets. You could measure this KPI almost anywhere: on your website, social media, email, display ads, PPC, etc.
- Average clickthrough rate (CTR):The average click-through rate tells you the percentage of users on a page (or asset) who click on a link.
- Average position:The average position KPI tells you about your site’s search engine optimization (SEO) and paid search performance. This demonstrates where you are on search engine results pages. Most online retailers have the goal of being number one for their targeted keywords.
- Pay-per-click (PPC) traffic volume:If you’re running PPC campaigns, this tells you how much traffic you’re successfully driving to your site.
- Blog traffic:You can find this KPI by simply creating a filtered view in your analytics tool. It’s also helpful to compare blog traffic to overall site traffic.
- Number and quality of product reviews:Product reviews are great for a number of reasons: They provide social proof, they can help with SEO, and they give you valuable feedback for your business. The quantity and content of product reviews are important KPIs to track for your ecommerce business.
- Banner or display advertising CTRs:The CTRs for your banner and display ads will tell you the percentage of viewers who have clicked on the ad. This KPI will give you insight into your copy, imagery, and offer performance.
- Affiliate performance rates:If you engage inaffiliate marketing, this KPI will help you understand which channels are most successful.
You can track yourecommerce marketing analyticsinGoogle Analyticsor usingShopify's built-in analytics tools.
What are KPIs customer service?
Customer service KPIs tell you how effective your customer service is and if you’re meeting expectations. You might be wondering: What should the KPIs be in our call center, for our email support team, for our social media support team, etc. Measuring and tracking these KPIs will help you ensure you’re providing a positive customer experience.
Key performance indicators for customer service include:
- Customer satisfaction (CSAT) score:The CSAT KPI is typically measured by customer responses to a very common survey question: “How satisfied were you with your experience?” This is usually answered with a numbered scale. Customer satisfaction is incredibly important to track, as it can impact virtually every part of your business.
- Net promoter score (NPS):Your NPS KPI provides insight into your customer relationships and loyalty by telling you how likely customers are to recommend your brand to someone in their network.
- Hit rate:Calculate your hit rate by taking the total number of sales of a single product and dividing it by the number of customers who have contacted your customer service team about said product.
- Customer service email count:这是the number of emails your customer support team receives.
- Customer service phone call count:Rather than email, this is how frequently your customer support team is reached via phone.
- Customer service chat count:If you have live chat on your ecommerce site, you may have a customer service chat count.
- First response time:First response time is the average amount of time it takes a customer to receive the first response to their query. Aim low!
- Average resolution time:这是the amount of time it takes for a customer support issue to be resolved, starting from the point at which the customer reached out about the problem.
- Active issues:The total number of active issues tells you how many queries are currently in progress.
- Backlogs:Backlogs are when issues are getting backed up in your system. This could be caused by a number of factors.
- Concern classification:Beyond the total number of customer support interactions, look at quantitative data around trends to see if you can be proactive and reduce customer support queries. You’ll classify the customer concerns that will help identify trends and your progress in solving issues.
- Service escalation rate:The service escalation rate KPI tells you how many times a customer has asked a customer service representative to redirect them to a supervisor or other senior employee. You want to keep this number low.
Tracking and working to improve customer service related KPIs can help you increase customer lifetime value, as well as reduce customer acquisition cost.
What are KPIs for manufacturing?
KPIs for manufacturing are, predictably, related to your supply chain and production processes. These may tell you where efficiencies and inefficiencies are, as well as help you understand productivity and expenses.
KPIs for manufacturing in ecommerce include:
- Cycle time:The cycle time manufacturing KPI tells you how long it takes to manufacture a single product from start to finish. Monitoring this KPI will give you insight into production efficiency.
- Overall equipment effectiveness (OEE):The OEE KPI provides ecommerce businesses with insight into how well manufacturing equipment is performing.
- Overall labor effectiveness (OLE):Just as you’ll want insight into your equipment, the OLE KPI will tell you how productive the staff operating the machines are.
- Yield:Yield is a straightforward manufacturing KPI. It is the number of products you have manufactured. Consider analyzing the yield variance KPI in manufacturing, too, as that will tell you how much you deviate from your average.
- First time yield (FTY) and first time through (FTT):FTY, also referred to as first pass yield, is a quality-based KPI. It tells you how wasteful your production processes are. To calculate FTY, divide the number of successfully manufactured units by the total number of units that started the process.
- Number of non-compliance events or incidents:In manufacturing, there are several sets of regulations, licenses, and policies businesses must comply with. These are typically related to safety, working conditions, and quality. You’ll want to reduce this number to ensure you’re operating within the mandated guidelines.
What are KPIs for project management?
KPIs for project management give you insight into how well your teams are performing and completing specific tasks, which is critically important when running an ecommerce store. Each project or initiative within your ecommerce business has different goals, and must be managed with different processes and workflows. Project management KPIs tell you how well each team is working to achieve their respective goals and how well their processes are working to help them achieve those goals.
KPIs for project management include:
- Hours worked:The total hours worked tells you how much time a team put into a project. Project managers should also assess the variance in estimated versus. actual hours worked to better predict and resource future projects.
- Budget: The budget indicates how much money you have allocated for the specific project. Project managers and ecommerce business owners will want to make sure that the budget is realistic; if you’re repeatedly over budget, some adjustments to your project planning need to be made.
- Return on investment (ROI):The ROI KPI for project management tells you how much your efforts earned your business. The higher this number, the better. The ROI accounts for all of your expenses and earnings related to a project.
- Cost variance:就像它是有用的比较实际与预测timing and hours, you should examine the total cost against the predicted cost. This will help you understand where you need to reel it in and where you may want to invest more.
- Cost performance index (CPI): The CPI for project management, like ROI, tells you how much your resource investment is worth. The CPI is calculated by dividing the earned value by the actual costs. If you come in under one, there’s room for improvement.
How do I create a KPI?
Selecting your KPIs begins with clearly stating your goals and understanding which areas of business impact those goals. Of course, KPIs for ecommerce can and should differ for each of your goals, whether they’re related to boosting sales, streamlining marketing, or improving customer service.
Key performance indicator templates
Here are a few key performance indicator templates, with examples of goals and the associated KPIs.
TIP:Go to yourAnalytics dashboardin Shopify admin to follow along and track these KPIs.
GOAL 1:Boost sales 10% in the next quarter.
KPI examples:
- Daily sales.
- Conversion rate.
- Site traffic.
GOAL 2:Increase conversion rate 2% in the next year.
KPI examples:
- Conversion rate.
- Shopping cart abandonment rate.
- Competitive pricing.
GOAL 3:Grow site traffic 20% in the next year.
KPI examples:
- Site traffic.
- Traffic sources.
- Promotional click-through rates.
- Social shares.
- Bounce rates.
GOAL 4:Reduce customer service calls by half in the next 6 months.
KPI examples:
- Service call classification.
- Pages visited immediately before call.
There are many performance indicators and the value of those indicators is directly tied to the goal measured. Monitoring which page someone visited before initiating a customer service call makes sense as a KPI for GOAL 4 since it could help identify areas of confusion that, when corrected, would reduce customer service calls. But that same performance indicator would be useless for GOAL 3.
Once you have set goals and selected KPIs, monitoring those indicators should become an everyday exercise. Most importantly: Performance should inform business decisions and you should use KPIs to drive actions.
Illustration by Till Lauer
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Eccommerce KPIs FAQ
How is ecommerce performance measured?
Ecommerce performance is measured using key performance indicators (KPIs). KPIs can differ depending on a business’s unique goals.Get started with Shopify
What is a KPI example?
For example, if a business wanted to measure the success of a recent online marketing campaign, a good KPI might be the number of unique visitors the site received from digital ads.Get started with Shopify
What are the key performance indicators in e-commerce?
有许多关键性能指标(kpi)n ecommerce. Common examples include conversion rate, website traffic, gross number of sales, shopping cart abandonment rate, and many more listed above.Get started with Shopify
What is the most important KPI for ecommerce?
The most important KPI for eccomerce is your conversion rate. A conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who make a purchase on your site. Conversion rate is calculated by dividing the number of visitors by the number of conversions.Get started with Shopify