Four E-Commerce Metrics to Consider Adding to Your Marketing Reports

As e-commerce remains a primary sales channel, online business owners and brands face steep competition. Not only in attracting and engaging potential customers but also in converting visitors into paying customers. As such, e-commerce marketing strategies and metrics are constantly evolving.

While metrics such as bounce rate, time on page, and cart abandonment rate dominate most website performance evaluations, according to MyTotalRetail, other metrics, such as customer hijacking, customer intent, and browser extension usage, are also worthy of evaluating as, “these data sources can set your brand apart from its competitors, especially as online culture increasingly curtails the use of third-party data.” But what exactly are they and how can they be measured?

Here is a brief overview of each metric and how it relates to overall reporting:

1. Customer Hijacking

Successful e-commerce business owners dedicate hours to carefully planning their customer’s journey and providing a favorable user experience. Unfortunately, price comparison shopping extensions and unauthorized advertisements interrupt over 20 percent of all customer journeys. These interruptions, in turn, distract shoppers, undermine user experience strategies, and potentially redirect shoppers from your website to competing sites (ie: customer hijacking). Furthermore, the extensions and adware causing these issues are usually present on users’ browsers or devices, rending most server-side solutions ineffective.

To help prevent customer hijacking, e-commerce business owners and brands must utilize software solutions that measure when interruptions appear and assess their impact conversion rate. It is recommended you shop for and implement solutions that include the option to block certain scripts or extensions used to divert traffic.

2. Browser Extensions

While certain extensions benefit e-commerce businesses, others curb revenue. Therefore, it’s vital to understand that shopping extensions impact the online shopping experience. Consider implementing browser extensions that measure the impacts of individual extensions on a range of metrics, such as average order value, revenue per visitor, conversion rate, bounce rate, and revenue.

Once you have implemented your extensions, it is recommended you systematically test whether these metrics improve with the extension enabled or disabled. That way, you can identify which extensions are promoting your brand and which are detrimental to your bottom line.

3. Inferred Customer Intent

Customer intent is generally inferred from data points such as traffic channels, keyword searches, and previous user behavior. However, with the decline of cookie-based tracking, these data points are becoming less reliable. Luckily, new technology calculates customer intent by analyzing real-time user behavior, from the moment they land on your site, using learning models that study unique, non-personally identifiable information (PII) data points.

These noninvasive methods allow you to evaluate how likely consumers are to make a purchase and gauge propensity for cart abandonment. Based on these metrics, e-commerce business owners can then target prospective customers with tailored promotions or discounts at the ideal time, making it far more likely that they will complete their customer journey. Many of the available solutions also incorporate first-party data sources, such as the type of device customers are using, what shopping extensions they’ve installed, and their location to further segment them for targeted marketing. Using these metrics, e-commerce business owners can then tailor each shoppers’ user experience based on their demographics and/or shopping habits.

4. Third-Party Services

Third-party services offer many benefits, including ready-made APIs, analytics scripts, and website components. However, many of these services are opaque about how they collect and use non-personally identifiable information (PII) data points and may transfer it unencrypted, which often leads to data breaches. And as consumers are wary of site security and how their data is used, and GDPR and CCPA laws hold businesses responsible for their users’ data (and you can risk prosecution if not cautious), it is imperative you know exactly where your customers’ data is going, and limit its spread as much as possible.

Several software solutions permit you to measure (in real time) what third-party services have access to which elements of your visitors’ information, allowing you to identify potential leaks and data breaches. This knowledge enables you to make informed decisions about which areas of your site third-party services are allowed to run on, and which services you permit to run.