With 84 million downloads, WooCommerce has become the second most popular ecommerce platform in the U.S., ahead of Magento, OpenCart, and Squarespace. eCommerce entrepreneurs love it because it is easy to set up and use and, yet, it is fully customizable. But, for you as an online retailer, these digits also mean more competition. To gain a competitive advantage, you first need to assess the performance of your WooCommerce store and keep improving it.
Now, you don’t need to be a digital marketing expert to understand that not all eCommerce metrics are valuable and insightful enough. Precisely because of that, I have made a list of 6 crucial metrics every WooCommerce website owner should track.
Conversion Rate
Your conversion rate represents the percentage of visitors that land on your website and take an action, be it downloading a whitepaper, making a purchase, signing up for your email list, etc. For example, if your site attracts 100 visitors and 7 of them buy your products, your conversion rate would be 7% (7 divided by 100).
You can track the WooCommerce conversion rate from Google Analytics > Goals > Overview. Sure, you will first need to enable enhanced ecommerce and set conversion goals properly. GA provides four kinds of goals – destination, duration, pages per session, events.
To boost conversions, you need to keep many factors in mind. Conversion rates are often indicators of how well your site is performing. If your website traffic is high, but your conversion rates are low, this means that something is preventing people from purchasing.
- Pay attention to your visitors from Google. Do those people convert better than referrals? This is important to know because you may be targeting the wrong keywords that attract irrelevant traffic to your site.
- Observe the overall website usability. Are your product pages mobile-friendly, informative, trustworthy, and optimized properly? Simplify your checkout pages – speed them up, shorten forms, and reduce the number of steps one needs to take when purchasing from your site.
- You should also compare your products and test whether there is a market demand for them.
Average Order Value
The average order value (AOV) is the average revenue that each purchase generates. Logically, it represents the sum of the value of all purchases divided by the number of purchases during the reporting period.
Knowing your AOV, you can focus on the tactics that will help you maximize it. For example, this could be upselling – persuading customers to buy an additional product or a product that is expensive than the one they have added to the cart. You could also sell products in bundles. For example, if a customer wants to purchase a dress, why not recommend matching shoes or accessories? Finally, you could offer discounts or free shipping above the threshold you set.
Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate
The shopping cart abandonment rate is the percentage of customers that add a product to your shopping cart and leave without making a purchase. You can measure your shopping cart abandonment rate in Google Analytics, too. Go to Conversions > Ecommerce > Shopping Behavior and you will see a visualization of your sales funnel, as well as the percentage of users that complete puchases or leave in each phase of a funnel.
Research says that 78% of buyers ditch shopping carts. Just like your conversion rates, shopping cart abandonment rates indicate that something is wrong with your site. Some of the most common reasons why people don’t finalize their purchase are:
- Seeing extra costs on your checkout page
- No security badges and trust seals
- Expensive shipping
- Too complicated checkout process and a long registration form
To boost user experiences and encourage them to buy from you, you will need to address these issues and optimize your checkout process. Consult a white label SEO company to help you map your WooCommerce site’s major bottlenecks and help you optimize your pages for better conversions. To bring the shoppers that kicked your shopping cart back to your store, use remarketing and personalize their experiences with your brand.
Customer Lifetime Value
Customer lifetime value (CLV) is the total revenue you would earn from an average buyer over their lifetime. For instance, if your typical customer makes 5 purchases and each is worth $20 during their lifetime, their lifetime value would be $100.
Your customer lifetime value is immensely important for several reasons. First, you will learn more about your customers and know how they can boost your revenue during their interaction with your brand. Second, CLV is directly related to customer acquisition costs (more on that later), as it directly impacts your marketing and acquisition strategies and costs. Knowing it, you will know how much you can spend to attract new customers or retain existing ones.
Now, you can track the lifetime value of customers you have acquired through multiple online channels via Google Analytics > Audience > Lifetime Value.
Customer Acquisition Cost
Attracting customers and expanding your customer base is only half the job done. The other half is estimating how acquiring each customer is profitable for you. For example, if you are spending $50 to acquire a customer, but your average order value is $30, this may impact your bottom line.
This is exactly why you need to track the Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), as it tells you how exactly you spend in marketing campaigns to attract each customer. It takes many factors into consideration, from your marketing efforts, sales costs to hiring the right people. You can calculate your CAC by dividing your acquisition spend by the number of customers acquired.
Customer Retention Rate
Studies prove that it is cheaper to retain a customer than to acquire a new one. Unfortunately, only 32% of online consumers come back to your site and make a purchase once again. In other words, most customers never come back to you after their first purchase. The reasons for that are multiple – a customer is dissatisfied with your website UX, they don’t need your products anymore, they are not interested in building long-term relationships with your brand.
This is why you need to measure your customer retention rate, or the percentage of customers you have managed to retain. You can track it in Google Analytics. Go to Conversions > Ecommerce > Shopping Behavior. You can measure the performance of your first-time customer, as well as your returning customers.
To boost retention rates, you need to focus on improving customer experiences. Create informative and engaging content that gains their trust. Use personalized content and offers to make your content/product recommendations more relevant to them. Reward their loyalty by offering massive discounts, creating VIP customer programs, or hosting giveaways and contests. Above all, optimize your site’s speed, mobile-friendliness, layouts, navigation, and checkout to provide friction-less customer experiences that will result in more sales.
Over to You
This is by no means the ultimate list of all metrics you should track, but it can serve as your solid starting point. Those are basic metrics you need to pay attention to when boosting your online presence. Of course, as your WooCommerce site grows, you will need to choose some additional metrics to track to gain better insights.
