You might be tracking many different metrics but probably they are not worth your time. By that I mean, you can rely on them but they are not worth million dollars. The hack here is to know which metrics are really important and which are not.
Here’s a list of some of the ‘not so important’ eCommerce business metrics and what to do about them.
1. Page views
A question that pops up in every eCommerce Business owners mind,’ How do I drive 100,000 visitors in a month? I need traffic really fast!
But isn’t it good to be realistic than to be over ambitious?
Unless you are getting paid for the views and you want the viewers to buy your services, then go for it!
Click and page views are worthless if people aren’t
1. Reading your website thoroughly
2. Buying your products or services
3. Fulfilling the goals that you have set on your page for visitors.
Clicks and page views are worthless if they are not giving you desired conversion rates
2. CTR
Click through rate is a ‘glorified metric’ that drives everyone crazy.
Let us say you’ve got 65% CTR but how many customers actually got converted? 2 out of 1000 clicks. These stats are not actually good for your business.
Look at this Adword table:-
The highest converting pages/highest traffic keyword have the lowest CTR.
The hack here is paying a low bid on the keyword and spending less money = lower positions = more competition = lower CTR. The whole account has an average total CTR of 3.49% but the average cost per conversation is 5x lower than the average sales revenue.
3. Impressions
Suppose, you have an online footwear store. You have made a kick-ass marketing strategy. People are getting invoked to visit your website and see the products. Jumping out of excitement you tell your boss, we have got 100,000 visitors today!” but what’s the use? If they are not taking any action; if they are not purchasing anything from your website.
4. Total number of Backlinks
Backlinks are cute. They make visitors land on your website. They also help in improving ranking metrics and credibility. But backlink quantity is often overhyped. If you’re also one of them who constantly worry about the number of backlinks that you end up getting, then my dear friend, you are practicing wrong tactics. URL’s with low DA’s are known to be spammy. It is like giving a balloon in the holiday shopping season.
Ideally, for the backlinks, you should link to some relevant and editorial based source which has some authority among the visitors.
5. Rankings
The ranking is loved by all(and why shouldn’t it be?) After all, who doesn’t love to be on #1 on google? We simply grind our content to the top ten positions and get our share of clicks.
Google is constantly changing and personalizing their methods. SEO rankings are more related to user search history now. So practicing little tactics is not going to as helpful as you think. And being #1 in SERPs doesn’t translate into conversions. You need a funnel, not a ranking.
6. A/B test results
People carry out A/B results to fetch deep and meaningful insights. That is because you are testing your own opinions and assumptions. Peep Laja from CXL tested tons of data and experiments and found that A/B testing is worthless if you have less than 1000 conversions per person. A/B has got no importance if you are not getting over 1k conversions per month.
▸ Things that you should be tracking instead:
▪ Backlink Quality
High-quality backlinks might be hard to get. A survey shows that about 37% people spend approx $10,000 and $50,000 per month on external link building. However, this doesn’t mean that you also need to spend that much. There is a lot that you can do to get better backlinks. The point here is not just to collect junk but to get links which ultimately define your authority in a specific area of work.
▪ ROI
Good ROI is hard to achieve. Statistics can lie. High conversions rates can be a fad. Having a close look at the ad campaigns is a good practice but what you really need to look is how much revenue do these campaigns bring. Look at this data. It shows how a marketing plan can be channelized across various areas based on ROI.
Conclusion
Instead of analyzing these metrics you should, analyze funnel Report Data, backlink quality, and ROI. Traffic, clicks, page views, CTR, etc don’t matter as much in the long run. Look at your overall funnel. Where are people coming in? What are they doing? Where are they going? Keep a tab on the backlinks; which ones are driving conversions. Focus on the one metric that matters, Track fewer, better metrics. The ones that count.
If you like the article, do let us know. Also, if you want to see what services we offer, check out the website.
