Top Metrics Every E-commerce Business Should Track with BI

Running an e-commerce business is more than just having a website and selling products online. To keep pace with the competitive landscape, it’s essential to track and analyze key performance metrics to make informed decisions and drive business growth. 

However, the vast amounts of data available can make it challenging to derive insights from it. This is where Business Intelligence (BI) can provide significant benefits.

BI provides the necessary tools to collect, analyze, and visualize data, giving a comprehensive view of business performance. It allows the creation and integration of data from various sources such as sales, marketing, finance, customer, etc., and transform it into a usable and meaningful format. Moreover, BI also offers unified visibility for all significant metrics and trends and patterns.  

But what are the top metrics that an eCommerce business should look after in order to improve customer experience & journeys, ROI (acquisitions & returns), etc? In the later segment of this blog, we will discuss the critical metrics that eCommerce businesses can track and how BI practices can help derive meaningful insights. 

The What & Why of eCommerce Metrics to Track through BI

1)Conversion Rate

Conversion rate refers to the percentage of eCommerce app visitors or users who take a desired action or complete a specific goal, typically referred to as a conversion. In the context of e-commerce, the conversion rate is often associated with the percentage of visitors who make a purchase.

Business Intelligence (BI) can play a significant role in improving the conversion rate for e-commerce businesses. Here are some of the ways BI can help:

• Data-Driven Insights: BI tools allow businesses to collect and analyze data related to customer behavior, website interactions, and sales funnel performance. By gaining insights from this data, businesses can identify bottlenecks or areas of improvement in the conversion process.

  For example, they can analyze the customer journey, identify pages with high bounce rates, or pinpoint steps in the checkout process where customers tend to drop off. These insights can help businesses optimize their website and user experience to increase conversions.

• A/B testing and experimentation: BI tools enable eCommerce teams to conduct A/B testing and experimentation to understand how different variations of website elements, such as layout, design, call-to-action buttons, or product descriptions, impact conversion rates. By testing different hypotheses and measuring the results, businesses can make data-driven decisions on which variations have the potential to drive higher conversion rates.
• Customer segmentation and personalization: Business intelligence for eCommerce allows segmenting the customer base and personalizing the user experience. By understanding customer preferences, behavior, and purchase history, businesses can tailor product recommendations, offers, and messaging to specific customer segments. Personalization can enhance the relevance and appeal of the website, leading to higher conversion rates.
• Sales and marketing performance tracking: BI tools provide real-time monitoring and reporting on sales and marketing performance metrics. By tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) such as click-through rates, conversion rates by traffic source, or campaign ROI, businesses can identify which marketing efforts are driving the highest conversion rates. This enables them to allocate resources and optimize marketing strategies accordingly.
• Predictive analytics and forecasting: BI tools leverage historical data and predictive analytics models to forecast future trends, customer behavior, and conversion rates. By using these forecasts, businesses can make informed decisions on pricing, inventory management, and promotional strategies to optimize conversion rates.

2)Customer Acquisition Rate

The customer acquisition rate for an e-commerce business refers to the rate at which new customers are acquired over a specific period of time. It is an essential metric for assessing the effectiveness of marketing and sales efforts in attracting and converting new customers.

Business Intelligence (BI) can help improve the customer acquisition rate for e-commerce businesses in several ways:

• Data-Driven Insights: BI tools allow businesses to collect and analyze data from various sources, such as website analytics, marketing campaigns, and customer behavior. By gaining insights from this data, businesses can identify the most effective channels, campaigns, and strategies for acquiring customers. This enables them to allocate resources and investments to the channels and campaigns that yield the highest return on investment (ROI), which ultimately helps in reducing customer acquisition costs.  
• Targeted marketing and segmentation: BI tools can help businesses segment their customers on various criteria, such as demographics, behavior, or purchase history. With this segmentation, businesses can create targeted marketing campaigns tailored to specific customer segments. Delivering personalized & relevant marketing messages increase the effectiveness of acquisition efforts, attracts more customers, has higher conversion potential, and thus low acquisition costs. 
• Real-time monitoring & optimization: BI tools provide real-time data to monitor and report marketing efforts. This allows the teams to analyze underperforming campaigns or areas of improvement to optimize the campaigns, adjust strategies, or allocate resources more effectively to improve customer acquisition rates.

SUCCESS STORY: Daffodil helps India’s largest fashion & apparel retailer to increase customer acquisition using insights from Power BI. 

3)Average Order Value

Average order value (AOV) measures the average amount spent by customers on each order. It provides insights into customer purchasing behavior and the overall revenue generated per transaction.

Here are some of the ways BI services can help eCommerce businesses improve the average order value:   

• Sales Performance Analysis: BI tools can provide detailed insights into sales performance by analyzing order data. Businesses can track key metrics such as total orders, average order value, order frequency, and order trends over time. By identifying patterns and trends, businesses can make data-driven decisions to optimize pricing, product offerings, and promotional strategies to increase the order rate.
• Product Performance Analysis: BI tools enable businesses to analyze the performance of individual products or product categories. By understanding which products are popular and driving high order rates, businesses can optimize their product assortment, focus marketing efforts on high-demand items, and identify opportunities for cross-selling or upselling to increase the average order rate.
• Customer Segmentation: BI tools allow businesses to segment customers based on various criteria such as demographics, purchase history, or browsing behavior. By segmenting customers, businesses can tailor marketing messages, promotions, and product recommendations to specific customer groups. This personalized approach can lead to higher order rates as customers receive more relevant and targeted offers.
• Inventory Management: BI tools can integrate with inventory systems to provide real-time visibility into stock levels, product availability, and order fulfillment. By ensuring that products are consistently available and ready to be shipped, businesses can minimize out-of-stock situations and order cancellations, thereby improving the order rate.
• Conversion Funnel Analysis: BI tools enable businesses to analyze the conversion funnel, from website visits to completed orders. By identifying points of drop-off or friction in the conversion process, businesses can make improvements to optimize the order rate. For example, businesses can identify and address issues with the checkout process, simplify forms, or implement trust signals to instill confidence in customers and increase order completion.
• Marketing Campaign Analysis: BI tools can track the effectiveness of marketing campaigns in driving orders. By analyzing data from various marketing channels, businesses can identify which campaigns generate the highest order rates and ROI. This information can help optimize marketing spend, allocate resources to high-performing channels, and refine marketing strategies to increase the order rate.

4)Cart Abandonment Rate

Cart abandonment rate refers to the percentage of online shoppers who add items to their shopping cart but leave the website without completing the purchase. It is a crucial metric that measures the effectiveness of the checkout process and indicates potential revenue loss for the business.

High cart abandonment rates indicate issues with the business apps or checkout process. Such problems need to be addressed on time to improve the customer experience and increase conversions. Businesses can identify potential problems by tracking cart abandonment rates and making data-driven decisions to optimize their business apps and checkout process.

Business Intelligence helps collect data from various sources (web apps, mobile apps, CRM, etc.) and identify the trends & patterns causing high cart abandonment. For example, if the customers are abandoning the cart due to high shipping costs, complicated checkout processes, missing payment gateways, or website errors. Based on the analysis made, relevant actions can be taken to reduce the cart abandonment rate.          

ALSO READ: Top 7 Ways to Leverage Business Intelligence for ECommerce

Elevate E-Commerce Success Rate through Data-Driven Decision Making

Running an eCommerce store demands focus on multiple aspects- establishing an online presence, crafting brand identity, developing product lines, and delivering exceptional customer experience. And to ace these areas, it’s important to make business decisions that are backed with data. 

The eCommerce metrics empower businesses to gauge the effectiveness of their endeavors and pinpoint areas that can benefit from strategic adjustments. By leveraging these insights, it is possible to analyze and enhance the store performance and drive better results for the eCommerce business.  

To derive meaningful insights from data (collected through various sources), business intelligence services can be a great help. With the right BI tools and dashboarding, businesses are empowered to analyze and visualize their data in a convenient and actionable manner. They can uncover patterns, trends, and correlations that may otherwise go unnoticed, enabling them to make informed decisions, identify opportunities for growth, optimize operational efficiency, and drive overall business success.