How to understand these 15 ecommerce metrics and make decisions from them

I’ve been working as a product manager for ecommerce businesses for the past 10 years, including five years at a company with a multibillion-dollar revenue. My main responsibility was to improve how the business was doing.

In the last few months, I’ve been helping people improve the performance of their online stores. But I’ve found that most of the help people needed was actually with understanding their business’ current status and the information they need to see in order to make the right decisions.

Some of them just didn’t know what metrics they should look at. They were tracking visitors and transactions but were unable to understand with more detail what was going on when sales went up or down. Others were overwhelmed by how much data was available and couldn’t determine what was actually important for proper decision making.

So, I figured I can put some of my experiences together and create an article about key indicators and the decisions you can make with the results.

Note: This article is based on Google Analytics because:

• It is the most widely used tool.
• It is available out of the box for most ecommerce store builders like Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, and Magento.
• It is free to use, a great advantage especially if you don’t have any tool now and need something to start with.

But the concepts and decisions explained here are equally valuable for any other analytics tool.

Basic metrics

There are certain metrics that you should analyze every day, as they provide the most basic information about the performance and health of your ecommerce business.

Transactions, conversion rate, and average order value

These core metrics specifically tell you about:

• The total number of transactions you receive over a period of time
• The conversion rate related to the sessions that occurred in a certain period
• The average order value considering all purchased items

Where to find them

Conversions > Ecommerce > Overview

Advanced conversion