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In online retail, it is possible to track almost everything: from your Facebook page likes to lifetime value of every customer, but it takes much time and efforts to get the data and focus on the metrics that matter for your online store growth.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s dive into the world of data and decide what metrics are vital for our store and what metrics should be considered vanity metrics. <\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n An online store has one main reason to exist \u2013 it is to gain more money. More customers equal higher conversions and higher revenue, lower logistics cost and employees\u2019 salary equal fewer expenses.<\/p>\n Everything an online store does is aimed at a higher profit. Even an Instagram account created a week ago. Some marketers claim there is more to it: effective feedback management, building loyalty in your customer community, helping people stay tuned with latest tech changes through the company blog and so on. However nice being popular is, ultimately, no. If everybody likes you, but nobody buys anything, it means there is something wrong with your \u201cfriendly communication.\u201d<\/p>\n A big group of metrics that are easily manipulated and do not necessarily correlate to the metrics that matter. Their distinctive feature is an illusion of success seasoned with big growth numbers. In reality, they are not worth a dime. It’s the illusion, Neo.<\/p>\n Analyzing those is a pure waste of time:<\/p>\n Those include numbers like \u201c1000 employees in the company\u201d, \u201c20K subscribers on Twitter\u201d, \u201c1.5 million unique email addresses in the database\u201d, \u201c5000 unique visits daily\u201d. Take it with a grain of salt: \u201c5000 visits\u201d does not equal 5000 active customers, 20K subscribers do not mean 20K clients. You got the logic.<\/p>\n If you track fishy metrics that make you feel big but do not say a word about your efficiency, take a heap of those and throw them in the fire \u2013 now they can warm you.<\/p>\n Time on page, session duration and so on. People forget that ultimately the store needs to serve the customer as fast as possible. This is what all those personalized product recommendations, advanced filtering, intelligent search and other frills, inaccessible to the biggest offline stores, are for.<\/p>\n Naturally, if the visitor has been hanging out on your website for 30 minutes, it does not directly point everything is alright, and the quality of your store is so stellar. On the contrary, it means that the visitors are failing to find what they want.<\/p>\n Session length is critical for content-oriented projects, for example, a blog or a movie streaming service. In this situation, more time spent on the site equals more profit. This is not the case of an online store, however.<\/p>\n The number of likes, shares and Thank You emails your store received over time may be heartwarming. Also, good for the team spirit. However, it has no obvious value and cannot influence revenue.<\/p>\n In the long run, 100 commentaries to your blog post may gain you, new customers. However, you\u2019ll never know what percent of your paying audience has been acquired through them. Rather than scrupulously analyzing this data, just enjoy your popularity and redirect your attention to the following.<\/p>\n Vanity metrics is behind us \u2013 who want to waste time on measuring and optimizing the numbers with no real revenue growth?<\/p>\n There is another big group with things having no direct correlation in income but nevertheless playing a significant role in decision making. Let\u2019s call them provisionals.<\/p>\n Those include:<\/strong><\/p>\n Every provisional doesn\u2019t per se inform you how effective the effort was regarding raising sales. Nevertheless, they can tell you if this or that campaign was effective in terms of traffic.<\/p>\n We will not list all the provisionals here as they are easily found in every marketing suite, for example, REES46 can track not only provisionals but also critical key metrics (found lower in the article).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Triggered emails widget displays the number of triggered emails sent and next to it \u2013 the number of clicks made through the email. This way you know how often the customers click links in your emails. If the click rate is too low, it\u2019s a good time to work on your call-to-action copy, or buttons layout or rework the design of your template.<\/p>\n Through the click on any scenario (pun intended), you get a detailed report. In it, you can see all the metrics and the dynamics:<\/p>\nVanity Metrics to Never Spend Your Time\u00a0on<\/span><\/h2>\n
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Average session duration<\/h3>\n
Metrics of “love and adorability”<\/h3>\n
Provisionals: Point to Start Paying Attention<\/h2>\n
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