Metrics that an e-commerce store should be tracking - Part 1 - Impression
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In the previous post we talked about how category goals are important, now let’s figure out what metrics, what KPIs are to be measured to check whether you are meeting your category goals. You want to know if the marketing efforts that you put in reaped any benefits yet or not. you want to know that even if you are marketing efforts are bringing customers to your online store, but your products are being sold or not.
This post and in coming few posts, we will talk about set up KPIs and how it helps to track the performance of the category.
Although you monitor the KPIs once you have launched the category or analyze the data once it has been some months running the category, what and how to track should be planned during category planning stage-I.
This post is mostly about e-commerce KPIs. In the next post, we will also talk about physical retail store KPIs. (If you have a Physical presence, you can monitor foot traffic, sales per square feet, monthly revenue per store.)
Financial Metrics : (These are financial metrics that you can consider as the outcome of your marketing or operational KPIs)
Top line sales (Volume, dollar, Market share)
Bottom line (Profitability)
Now, Let’s go to the conversion funnel that we discussed and discuss the metric.
Impressions
Your e-commerce store is your retail space online. Just like if you are a store in a mall, you want to be seen; if you are running a shop online, you need to be seen. No. of impressions tells you if you are being seen.
Now why does it matter? Because if you are not being seen, nobody will walk into the store, right?
In the past, while working on one of the ecommerce project (newly launched internet business), I was talking to one of my co-worker. We were looking at the sales data and could see our no. are not good. Our conversion rate is pretty good based on Industry standard. We realized that many people still don’t know the brand yet. Once they are in our ecommerce store, they like the product they buy it, but what if not many people are even entering into the store.
We realized that we need to have good impressions first so that people get to know our brand.
if your conversion rate is low, and impression is good (Brand awareness is there), then you would like to focus on getting the conversation rate of your category right.
So in short, Metrics will help you to figure out where do you invest your energy and resource.
Back to the brand awareness. If you are new in the market, your goal is to build a brand. People should know your brand, your product. That means you should be able to leave an impression in the mind of your target segment.
Note that this impression, I am talking about right now, is at the ecommerce store level and not at the category level. But it will give you an idea of what’s happening at the macrolevel. (As a category manager of let’s say, furniture, it might be not under your control to improve impression if you are running multiple categories in your ecommerce store, but you can combine it with other metrics to see how it is influencing your category. )
Now we know the purpose of measuring impression, lets define it :
Impression = No. of times your online presence (social media, ecommerce website etc.) appear on users search result / How many time the online page were displayed / Eyeballs
How to measure impressions:
Imagine, you have a big billboard installed on the highway of the city displaying your ad, but you don’t know if people actually view it or not, but it’s there to be seen. In physical world, you can guess how many cars walk by and maybe people will notice the billboard, so you can guesstimate. but in online, you can reach more accuracy level.
Impressions are measured in Cost per mile (CPM). That is basically dollar value you pay as an advertiser per 1000 impressions.
How much you are paying may tell you how much you are being seen, although not necessarily (Read impression fraud)
Google analytics
Image source
2. Also, you have Facebook Impression, Twitter impression as well.
So how does impression count happen? Ad manager
Ad Manager counts an impression each time a creative is downloaded in the user's device and has begun to load. Note that the impression is counted before the creative is fully downloaded and viewed by the end user.
You don’t need to worry about how its being counted. Your digital marketing team can integrate various tools like google analytics, google tag manger, Adobe analytics, AppFlyer (for mobile apps), etc.
You just have to make sure that the display data (Impression) is being collected and stored. Using Excel, Tableau you can analyze and make sense of the data combining different metrics.
By the ways, you can also go to product level.
The enhanced ecommerce plug-in for analytics.js enables the measurement of user interactions with products on ecommerce websites across the user's shopping experience, including: product impressions, product clicks, viewing product details, adding a product to a shopping cart, initiating the checkout process, transactions, and refunds.
So that’s it for now.
In the next post, we will talk about event tracking, conversion rate.
See you next week :) Leave a comment if you are in the mood.