These top three eCommerce metrics are something every business owner should know. As a founder of a digital marketing agency, ROI Swift, I'm constantly surprised when marketing execs and founders aren't familiar with the performance of their online business. Before spending money on advertising, make sure you're familiar with the following three key metrics.
#1 - eCommerce Conversion Rate
Knowing how well your eCommerce store converts is necessary to understand your conversion funnel. In general, for companies with an average order value of $150 or less, we like to see the following.
| Metric | Benchmark |
| Add to Cart | 6% or more of visitors |
| Checkout Started | 4% or more of visitors |
| Purchase | 2% or more of visitors |
It’s standard to have about 25-30% of your cart traffic checkout and make a purchase. You can find this info in two places:
#2 - Page Load Speed
Believe it or not, the prettiest pages in the world won’t convert if the page loads slowly. For this reason, our next eCommerce Metric that matters is page load speed. As a Google Agency Partner, we've seen the research showing eCommerce sites losing 40% of traffic if pages take more than 4 seconds to load.
Do this now with your phone. Load a page and count out four seconds. It’s a long time. If you want a more modern way to check page load speed, try Google Pagespeed Insights, and GT Metrix.
If the load time to interactivity (when a user can click on something) is more than 4 seconds, here are a few things to look at:
These are just a few examples of page speed optimizations. Talk with your web developer for additional page load speed optimizations.
#3 - Average Order Value
Average order value matters a lot. It’s needed to calculate what you can afford to spend per acquisition and still be profitable.
Let’s look at an example.
| Company A | Company B | |
| Average Order Value | $40 | $80 |
| Cost of Goods Sold & Expenses | 40% | 40% |
| Margin after COGS | $24 | $48 |
| Breakeven Cost Per Acquisition | $24 | $48 |
If you have a business without high repeat sales, you want your cost per acquisition to be below the breakeven cost per acquisition to be profitable. If you have a business WITH high repeat sales and some cash in the bank, you can break even on the first sale and be profitable by the second or third sale depending on your model.
For businesses looking to begin paid advertising, the above metrics matter because they will influence the profitability of paid advertising efforts. Once you’re familiar with these metrics, you can begin paid advertising with confidence. To recap:
