E-Commerce Insights : 5 Online Metrics to Maximize All That Data

Work with the numbers; don’t be buried by them

Picture this: You’re on a sunny beach, stretched out on the sand. A child is sitting next to you with pail and shovel in hand. The child mischievously starts covering your ankles and feet in sand. You smile and continue sipping your refreshing piña colada.

Now a dump truck pulls up and pours a mountain of sand all over you. You’re buried, and the sand muffles your scream.

The former, pleasant scene represents the amount of data your marketing staff had to deal with about 10 years ago. The dump truck represents today’s daily data deluge.

It certainly can be overwhelming, but it also represents a gold mine for you. So make the most of this data by focusing on the five actionable metrics.

1. Check Out Fallouts
Watch the portion of shoppers who load their carts with product only to abandon the process altogether. To address this, find the places where shoppers bail. Use Google Analytics to track your fallout numbers. (Learn how to create a fallout report in the whitepaper on CatalogSuccess.com, which can be found under Related Content beside this article.)

Here are two common ways to catch fallouts:

• Shoppers click helpful information links during checkout and never go back to finish. Think about checkout lines at Target. They’re alleys that you have to proceed down with little hope of escape. Remove all links from your checkout process so shoppers have only one way to move forward.
• Shoppers can’t remember their logins, and they’re often frustrated by your “helpful” password reminder notes. So try a guest checkout that doesn’t require a login. Better yet, use a one-page checkout that asks shoppers to type their contact information rather than logging in.

Many shoppers don’t frequent a site enough to remember their logins. You actually decrease the percentage of customers who complete checkout by making them search for that information.

2. Start Cart Percent
You can’t get shoppers to check out if they never put anything into their carts. This metric shows how effective your site is at merchandising. If you get the fallout numbers noted above, it’s simple to compute start carts. If you want an advanced version, pay attention to the products and categories that have the highest start-cart percentage. Drive shoppers to those products by putting them on the homepage or in e-mails.

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