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.
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 a or 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.
Learn More: How to Conduct a SWOT Analysis for Your Business
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 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:
67 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 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.
Examples of important ecommerce metrics and KPIs for sales include:
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.
If you run an ecommerce store, you can use marketing 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 better, and inform product development.
Examples of KPIs you can use for marketing include:
You can track your ecommerce marketing analytics in Google Analytics or using Shopify’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:
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 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:
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:
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.
GOAL 1: Boost sales 10% in the next quarter.
KPI examples:
GOAL 2: Increase conversion rate 2% in the next year.
KPI examples:
GOAL 3: Grow site traffic 20% in the next year.
KPI examples:
GOAL 4: Reduce customer service calls by half in the next 6 months.
KPI examples:
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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How is ecommerce performance measured?
Ecommerce performance is measured using key performance indicators (KPIs). KPIs can differ depending on a business’s unique goals.
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.
What are the key performance indicators in e-commerce?
There are many key performance indicators (KPIs) in ecommerce. Common examples include conversion rate, website traffic, gross number of sales, shopping cart abandonment rate, and many more listed above.
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.
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