Nowadays, competition in eCommerce is fierce. That’s why if you want to stand out from your competitors you need to optimize your store. Having the right plugins and the best themes will help but if you want to build a strong position in the market, you’ll need more than that. What do the most successful eCommerce stores have in common? They’re data-driven. And you should do the same because data is what will allow you to grow. Why? Because if you don’t measure your main WooCommerce metrics, you don’t know what’s working and what’s not.

Even though this may sound complex, the truth is that you don’t need to optimize every single metric or Key Performance Indicator (KPI) for your site. Instead, focus on the main ones. So how do you know which metrics you should monitor? Although this may change depending on your website and industry, some key metrics are good indicators of how your eCommerce is performing. Today, we’ll have a look at the 7 WooCommerce metrics that you should be tracking in your store.

7 WooCommerce metrics that you should be tracking

The most important WooCommerce metrics you should track are:

1. Conversion Rate
2. Average Order Value
3. Customer Life Time Value (CLTV)
4. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
5. Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate
6. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
7. Returning customer rate

1. Conversion rate

The conversion rate is one of the most important metrics in eCommerce. A conversion can be different things. A user giving you his email to get an ebook can be a conversion. Someone buying one of your products too.

We’re going to focus on eCommerce so we’ll define conversion rate as the percentage of visitors that purchase in your store. This means that if you receive 100 visitors and 6 of them purchase from you, your conversion rate is 6% (6 divided by 100).

Conversion rates vary depending on the industry but in most eCommerce sites it’s usually between 2% and 3%.

The overall conversion rate is a good performance indicator but to make the most of it, you can break it down into more specific metrics. You could analyze conversion by traffic source, device, product, and so on to understand some of the following:

• Do users that come from Google convert better or worse than referrals?
• Do mobile customers convert as much as desktop users?
• Does my Product A convert more or less than my Product B?

If you want to go one step even further to understand the whole user funnel, you could also monitor the percentage of visitors that give you their details. And then what percentage of those end up buying.

This type of segmentation will allow you to fully understand what’s working and what’s not working in your WooCommerce store so you can adjust what’s needed.

2. Average Order Value

The Average Order Value (AOV) indicates the average revenue that each order generates. This is the sum of the value of all the orders divided by the number of orders you received during that period.

The AOV is a key element to determine your CLTV and it’s one of the most important elements for growth in eCommerce. That’s why you should make it one of your main WooCommerce metrics.

3. Customer Life Time Value (CLTV)

The Customer Life Time Value (CLTV) is a key metric that every online store should track. It’s the revenue that a user will generate during their lifetime as a customer.

Let’s say your average order value is $50 and that every customer purchases from you an average of 10 times. This means that the CLTV is $500, this is $50 x 10.

It’s important to analyze CLTV because it’ll give you an indication of how much you can spend to acquire and retain a user. CLTV is closely related to customer loyalty so the more users come back and buy from you, the higher CLTV you’ll have.

4. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is another vital metric in the eCommerce world. CAC represents all the costs of gaining a customer. It includes all the marketing and sales expenses associated with converting a visitor into a client.

It’s important to note that CAC and CLTV should be tracked closely. If your CAC is greater than your CLTV it means that for every customer you get, you lose money. To reduce your CAC you could work on customer loyalty to improve repetition and increase conversion rate.

All in all, if you want to become more data-driven, CAC is one of the most important WooCommerce metrics you should be tracking in your store.

5. Shopping Cart Abandonment rate

Shopping Cart Abandonment is a crucial ratio. Shopping cart abandonment is the percentage of users that add an item to their cart but then leave the store without buying anything. Shockingly, this affects more than 75% of shoppers so you must work to reduce cart abandonment as much as possible.

As you can imagine, this has a huge impact on conversion rates. That’s why you should improve the checkout process with tools like Checkout Manager and Direct Checkout, and make the most of each visitor.

The good news is that with a smart strategy you can recover up to 20% of the abandoned carts. So we recommend you have a look at our guide on how to recover an abandoned cart and increase your conversion rates.

6. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Nowadays, online users are bombarded with ads so word-to-mouth has become more and more important. That’s why the Net Promoter Score (NPS) is one of the most critical WooCommerce metrics that you should track.

The NPS is an index that indicates your shoppers’ satisfaction with your business. It measures how likely customers are to recommend your store to their friends and family. It ranges from -100 to +100. Depending on users’ responses, it classifies them into promoters, passives, and detractors.

But what’s a good NPS? Any negative score means that there’s room for improvement while a positive one is considered ok. However, as a general rule, an NPS between 30 and 49 is considered good, from 50 to 69 is excellent, and 70 and above is world-class. 

Please keep in mind that these are standards. You should check your industry average to know where you stand. According to Satmetrix, the average score for eCommerce stores is 45 (while the overall average was 23).

7. Returning customer rate

The returning customer rate is often overlooked but still key to track. Websites usually put all their efforts into acquiring new users. However, they forget that selling to an existing client is easier and cheaper than selling to a new one.

Returning customer rate is the percentage of shoppers that purchase from your store more than once over the total. And why is it so important? Because not only does it help you measure customer loyalty but also improve your CLTV.

WooCommerce bonus metrics

Apart from those 7, there are other WooCommerce metrics you should keep an eye on:

Bounce rate

The bounce rate is the percentage of single-page sessions over the total number of sessions. In other words, it’s the percentage of sessions in which a user visited one page on your site and then left. You can have a look at your site’s bounce rate in Google Analytics.

Google Analytics measures the length of a session based on the time between hits. Therefore, it considers that these single-page sessions have a duration of 0 seconds (because they only have 1 hit).

Average Session Duration

This is the time that the users spend on your site. You can also check this metric in Google Analytics > Audience.

Viewers don’t spend the same time on all the pages. So, to have a more in-depth view, you should also check the Average Time on Page (under Behaviour). This will show you the time that users spend each specific page.

We also recommend you segment the main metrics to get better insights. Some questions you may want to answer are:

• Where are your users from?
• Do you get more visits from mobile or desktop?
• What converts more: organic traffic, referrals, direct traffic, or social?
• Is conversion better in mobile or desktop?
• Do users from the United States have a higher or lower conversion than the ones from Germany? And what about time on site and pages viewed?

Conclusion

There are indeed many other WooCommerce metrics that you can measure. However, tracking these on a weekly/monthly basis is a great start and will give you a good overview of your business’ performance. This will help you identify what’s working and what’s not working in your eCommerce store.

Before you start tracking your main metrics, you need to define the KPIs you’re going to focus on and set goals for each of them. This will allow you to have a benchmark for each metric that will help you understand the actual performance.

What other metrics are you analyzing? Please share your experiences with us in the comments below!