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We’re back today to continue our profile-based dashboard series, and, as we’re currently at Shop.org in Philadelphia, we’re presenting our recommendations for top KPIs and charts to include in an ideal optimized eCommerce dashboard.
In order to address some of the most important eCommerce objectives, we’ll discuss how teams can best display marketing performance, outcomes and customer satisfaction. We’ll run through common metrics to get started then move to some more complex computed metrics to help you effectively inform your CMO of your performance. Finally we’ll visit some of the best data visualizations to explore why you are seeing the results you are.
If you’re anything like us, you’re probably really busy this week running between keynotes and sessions, so we’ll break the series up into sections. Today our focus is Marketing Performance. Look out for the other sections in the coming days!
So, read on for some impactful multi-source metrics and insightful charts, or check out our previous post on email marketing dashboards.
There are a multitude of general marketing metrics that are highly useful for an eCommerce team. These may include the following:
– Metrics to measure site traffic: total visits, new visitors, returning visitors
– Metrics to show visitor behavior on site: bounce rate, product page visits, product views per visit, average page views, time on site/page, internal searches, return rate, unique visitors vs. returning visitors
– Metrics that demonstrate site performance & usability: page loading time, bounce rate, exit pages, 404 visits
– Metrics that indicate campaign success: referral sources, branded vs. non-branded keywords, newsletter subscribers, PPC traffic volume, campaign CTR, campaign conversions, campaign cost per acquisition, Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)
– Micro-conversion metrics: newsletter subscriptions, social followers and/or shares, contact page views, new account registrations, add to wishlist, product reviews, rich media plays, affiliate performance
– Metrics that indicate engagement: social media likes, followers, shares and ‘talking about this’, email open rate, click & conversion rates
– Competitive Intelligence: own prices vs. competitor prices, competitor’s top keywords
While executives may ask to see a number of the above metrics, based on their own objectives and information needs, often they are strapped for time. A great option for getting around this is to link their own concise and impactful dashboard to those more detailed operational dashboards of the eCommerce manager so that they are presented with a rapid initial impression of performance, but are also able to explore in more depth if desired.
Therefore, to give that quick snapshot your executive team may require, we have found the following KPIs to be really useful:
– Brand Traffic: total of visitors to/viewers of owned, earned and paid assets
– Engaged visitors: % visitors who complete a pre-defined micro conversion. Depending on your assets and objectives, these may be any of those listed above in “Micro-conversion metrics”
– Campaign success: a general KPI showing your campaign success can be extremely useful in helping you to compare the performance of multiple campaigns. This KPI will most likely be unique to each organization or even department, but may include a combination of metrics including data from multiple different sources. Some examples of metrics that contribute to Sweetspot’s campaign success KPI include: reach, ROAS, or cost per conversion, plus number or percent of engaged users
– ROMI or return on marketing investment: by dividing the additional value that your marketing efforts have created by the cost of all your marketing activities, you can easily glean your success.
The data visualization options that could help you to better understand your marketing performance are endless. While your metrics and KPIs help you to interpret what is happening with your marketing, charts and tables are highly useful for enabling you to understand why you are seeing these results.
Some examples of top charts and tables include:
Leads & cost by channel
This chart is particularly helpful in allowing you to understand which channels are bringing you the greatest number of leads, but also helps to highlight which are most cost effective. A simple combination column and line chart can quickly and effectively show you your most promising channels.
Engagement by activity
A column chart showing which activities engaged users most often participate in will help you to understand which are performing well (and can be further optimized to help push engaged users into becoming converted users), and which are not encouraging much engagement. In this case, it may be a matter of either deciding to better invest these resources elsewhere, or to explore why they are not successful and attempt to optimize them.
Cost per Conversion and engaged users per campaign
This visualization can very quickly show you which campaigns are encouraging the greatest engagement and resulting in most cost effective in conversions. Exploring your data to further understand why each campaign is so successful, or relatively unsuccessful, will help give you ideas on how you can run impactful future campaigns.
Are there any other marketing performance metrics or charts you find especially useful for your eCommerce dashboard? We’d love to hear your thoughts!
Look out for our next post on top outcome measures to show on your optimized eCommerce dashboard tomorrow and don’t forget to come and see us at booth 421 at Shop.org!
VP of Business Development for Sweetspot. Responsible for strategic brand development, marketing and business development. BA/BComm graduate from the University of Melbourne. My passion lies in finding creative solutions and encouraging collaboration.
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