Essential Metrics & KPIs for eCommerce & Marketing
There are countless eCommerce and digital marketing KPIs and metrics to become familiar with - but which are the ones that matter most? Below is our list of the things that are top of mind for us, as well as a bit about why they matter and their potential pitfalls.
Read everything here or download a PDF of just the top page of our cheat sheet.
eCommerce Website metrics
Dollars per session ($/session)
Conversion rate (CVR)
Average order value (AOV)
Average unit retail (AUR)
Items per transaction (IPT)
Percent of sessions with site search
Number of null searches
Pages per session
Mobile mix and performance
Bounce rate
Cart to detail
Purchase to detail
General digital marketing metrics
Cost per acquisition (CPA) / Cost per Lead (CPL) / Cost per order (CPO)
New customer rate (%)
Cost per new customer (CPNC)
Customer acquisition cost (CAC)
Return on ad spend (ROAS)
Advertising to Sales (A/S) Ratio
General business metrics
Customer lifetime value (LTV)
Customer retention rate (CRR)
Customer repurchase rate
Purchase frequency
Net promoter score (NPS)
Additional unique metrics (sub-KPIs) per channel
Affiliates
Number of active publishers (click)
Number of active publishers (order)
Percent of revenue from top 10 publishers
Percentage of content vs. coupon affiliates
Number of active affiliates added
Display
Click-through rate
Percent of revenue from retargeting ads
Email / SMS
Open rate
Unsubscribe rate
Number of new email / SMS subscribers
Inbox placement percentage
Revenue per 1K sent
Click to open rate
Percent of revenue from triggered emails
Organic Search
Brand to non-brand revenue ratio
Google as a percent of organic traffic and sales
Number of pages indexed
Number of referring domains added
Paid Search
Trademark to non-brand revenue ratio
Google as a percent of paid search traffic and sales
Traffic and sales by search engine
Paid Social
Performance by platform
Referrals
Performance (e.g., revenue, conversion) by referral source
Shopping Ads
Number of products sent (Merchant Center)
Performance by publisher (e.g., Google, Amazon)
Social Media (organic)
Performance by social source
Number of total followers
Social engagement rate
Video
View count
Play rate
Watch time
Video engagement rate
Table of Contents Show
High-Level Metrics
Website Metrics
Dollars per session ($/session)
What is it? A measure of the revenue or demand generated for each visitor on your website. This is a hybrid metric that accounts for AOV and conversion rate.
How do you calculate it? Divide total revenue or demand by the number of sessions (or users, if sessions are unavailable)
Why should you care? This metric helps you understand if your site performance is increasing over time, while balancing pricing changes & promotional discounts, or other tests that could impact either AOV or Conversion rate.
Potential pitfalls: If your marketing mix changes to a blend of more upper funnel or awareness media, your $/session will drop.
Conversion rate (CVR)
What is it? A measure of the percentage of people visiting your site who take the desired action - either purchasing a product, filling out a lead form or taking another target action.
How do you calculate it? Divide the number of actions (e.g., orders, leads) by the total number of sessions. For companies with a longer consideration phase such as luxury goods or business software, conversion rate can sometimes be measured as a percentage of users (instead of sessions). For a user-based conversion rate, divide the number of actions (e.g., orders, leads) by the total number of users.
Why should you care? Keep an eye on this metric to ensure you are continually optimizing in the right direction, getting more people to purchase or submit their information
Potential pitfalls: As your mix of visitors changes between devices and channels, especially toward the upper funnel, your conversion rate may decrease even though your business is healthy. Similarly, if you increase pricing, your conversion rate may decrease even if profitability is increasing.
Average order value (AOV)
What is it? The average (mean) size of a typical transaction on your website. This is different from the median, which may be different on sites that have a large variance in price points.
How do you calculate it? Take total revenue and divide it by the number of orders
Why should you care? Shipping is one of the highest expenses for eCommerce businesses, and you want to make sure that margin dollars from the total transaction value are high enough to cover fees if you aren’t charging. In addition to AOV, you should also understand your median order value.
Potential pitfalls: If your site has a wide range of price points with low transaction volume, or if your site attracts B2B or shoppers that often place disproportionately large orders, your AOV may fluctuate significantly from day to day or week to week. Watch for outliers and statistical significance.
Average unit retail (AUR)
What is it? The average price point of each item within your transaction. This differs from AOV because it’s the measure of each item in the basket, as opposed to the total basket.
How do you calculate it? Take total revenue and divide it by the number of total items sold
Why should you care? This metric allows you to keep an eye on whether people are buying more expensive or less expensive items from your store
Potential pitfalls: When you feature items in an email or other media (for example, social ads, display, print, radio or TV) the AUR may change temporarily as velocity for that product increases
Items per transaction (IPT)
What is it? The number of items, on average, in each basket or order.
How do you calculate it? Take the total quantity of items sold and divide it by the number of orders / transactions
Why should you care? This helps you understand how effectively you are upselling or cross-selling merchandise on your website. It is generally correlated with AOV. Smaller add-on items can often have higher margin, especially if they can be included in the same shipping box for nominal incremental expense.
Potential pitfalls: If you run free gift with purchase type promotions, this metric may change depending on whether or not the item is shown as a line item on an order
Percent of sessions with site search
What is it? A measure of the percent of users submitting at least one query on internal site search
How do you calculate it? Google Analytics provides this information in their Site Search Overview and Usage reports, so long as you’ve configured site search capture in the Admin section. Alternatively, take the total number of Sessions and divide it by the number of Sessions with Search.
Why should you care? Users who leverage site search often convert at a higher rate than non-site search users.
Potential pitfalls: Sometimes marketers will send traffic directly to search results pages if they can’t find a suitable category or subcategory page. Make sure your data isn’t skewed by this. Note that you should also track your site search conversion rate or $/session on an absolute basis, and as a ratio relative to that metric for non-site search users.
Number of null searches
What is it? This is the number of searches happening on your website that are yielding no results. In other words, this is people looking for things you don’t carry or that are not tagged in a way that allows the internal site search engine to find them.
How do you calculate it? This is not a calculation, but instead, a raw number. To find this information you can either configure a custom event for Google Analytics or else you can get the details from your internal site search solution provider.
Why should you care? This is an easy way to keep tabs on what your visitors or prospective customers are hoping to find. They are raising their hands asking you for something, including potentially a product they wish to purchase.
Potential pitfalls: Watch for sold-out products or categories. If a popular item has been discontinued, it may shift into null searches.
Pages per session
What is it? This is a view into how many pages your website’s visitors view on average and can help illustrate engagement level.
How do you calculate it? Take the total number of sessions and divide it by page views. This is a standard metric in Google Analytics and other analytics platforms.
Why should you care? Changes in relative pages per session could indicate a positive increase in the quality of traffic (i.e., users are more engaged with the site therefore visiting more pages) or an indication that the site has become more difficult to find what a customer or user is looking for
Potential pitfalls: More is not always better, especially for an ecommerce website. This may indicate that prospective customers are having a difficult time finding what they are looking for. Conversely, if you have an advertising supported content website or are selling a high-consideration product like a car or software, a higher average pages per visit may indicate engagement.
Mobile mix and performance
What is it? This is a separate view of all of the metrics discussed in the document, but segmented for mobile versus desktop.
How do you calculate it? While Google does provide some high level reports under Audience > Mobile > Overview, you’re much better off creating segments for desktop traffic and mobile traffic, then looking at each of the KPIs or sets of data referred to in this blog post / document as a comparison.
Why should you care? The two device types perform very differently, and can blend down your averages. Now that mobile traffic is dominant for many ecommerce sites, you want to ensure you are using pertinent information to optimize your marketing mix and responsive version of your website.
Potential pitfalls: If your site attracts a lot of blog traffic, that tends to hit mobile. Similarly, social traffic and email also tend to reach people on their phones. You may want to consider excluding blog traffic from both segments if you want a more clean view of your ecommerce performance.
Bounce rate
What is it? This is a measure of the percentage of sessions in which people viewed a single page on your website as compared to total sessions.
How do you calculate it? Divide single page sessions by total sessions. This is a standard metric found on many Google Analytics reports including marketing channels and top pages.
Why should you care? If you have a high bounce rate, it means that people are not responding well to the content on your website - whether that’s a product, article or your homepage. A high bounce rate may indicate that your marketing strategy is unoptimized and that you are spending money driving unqualified visitors. Check specific product pages for high bounce rates and optimize their product images, copy and consider refining your pricing strategy.
Potential pitfalls: Blog articles are likely to be single sessions, so if your website has a large blog presence, consider creating a segment that excludes those pages. This will allow you to measure the bounce rate on the ecommerce portion of the website. Note that bounce rate is different from the exit rate. Exit rate is based on the pages from which people are leaving your website, even if those people viewed multiple pages.
Cart to Detail rate (aka Basket to Detail rate)
What is it? This is a comparison between the number of people who viewed your product detail page and those that added it to their shopping cart.
How do you calculate it? The formula to calculate cart to detail rate is product adds (to cart) divided by views of the product detail page. However, this is a standard metric in Google Analytics. You will find it in the Product Performance section of Conversions / Ecommerce.
Why should you care? This is a core factor that impacts your conversion rate. If people are visiting the product page, but not bothering to add it to their cart to begin the process, you may be wasting precious site visits. Visitors may not be interested in the product
Potential pitfalls: If you are driving a lot of upper funnel or email traffic to a particular product, the cart to detail rate may decrease temporarily for that product. Consider looking at acc
Purchase to Detail rate
What is it? This is a comparison of the number of people who viewed your product detail page and those that purchased the product.
How do you calculate it? The formula to calculate cart to detail rate is product conversions divided by views of the product detail page. However, this is a standard metric in Google Analytics. You will find it in the Product Performance section of Conversions / Ecommerce.
Why should you care? This is a building block to conversion rate. If people are visiting the product page, but not purchasing it, you will want to understand why.
Potential pitfalls: Keep an eye out for changes in inventory or sizes, and how they impact this metric. For example, if you are selling women’s shoes and don’t have an 8 available anymore, that alone could drop your purchase to detail rate.
General Digital Marketing Metrics
Cost per acquisition (CPA) / Cost per lead (CPL) / Cost per order (CPO)
What is it? This is a measure of the average cost for each transaction, lead or other key activity captured on your website. Most eCommerce websites use cost per order (CPO) or cost per acquisition (CPA), while B2B sites typically focus on CPL.
How do you calculate it? To calculate this metric, you will take your marketing spend for that channel and divide it by the number of orders, leads or other type of acquisition that you are trying to measure. For example, spend/orders or spend/leads. You can also calculate this for your total site, in addition to looking at it on a channel basis.
Why should you care? In order to improve profitability, you should generally aim to reduce your cost per acquisition, cost per lead or cost per order.
Potential pitfalls: The biggest issue with these metrics is that not all orders, leads and acquisitions are created equally. Orders may have different dollar values, some leads may be less or more qualified, and certain acquisitions may be less important than others.
You can also optimize yourself out of business if you are solely focused on this metric - for example, you may be able to have a very efficient CPO, but it may lead to low transaction volume. Find the best middle ground between velocity of sales and profit.
New customer rate (%)
What is it? This is a measure of the percentage of your orders that come from new customers as opposed to repeat customers.
How do you calculate it? Choose a period of time and take the total number of new customers and divide it by total customers..
Why should you care? Each new customer you drive can have a higher lifetime value (LTV). When a marketing channel, tactic or keyword is better at attracting new customers rather than repeat ones, you may be able to pay a higher cost per order in that channel.
Potential pitfalls: You will want to measure this at a more granular level so that you can understand comparative data. Certain marketing channels, like email, will naturally have a lower new customer rate. You want to use this to find the media that is attracting new buyers to your business.
Cost per new customer (CPNC)
What is it? This is a measure of your cost to acquire each new customer. It differs from cost per order because you are only focused on how much you have spent to bring new customers to your business.
How do you calculate it? Take total marketing spend and divide it by the number of new customers acquired in that time period. You can do this for a specific marketing channel or tactic, or for your website as a whole.
Why should you care? Whenever you advertise, you are spending money to bring back customers that already know you, as well as those that are unfamiliar with your business. This metric allows you to better understand what you are spending to fuel new growth.
Potential pitfalls: Not all new customers are created equally, so ensure that you are capturing this metric where average order values are similar. For example, if you are selling computers and TVs, your cost per new customer should differ significantly between the two. However, if you’re selling bouquets of flowers and they are similarly priced, you can look at cost per new customer at a more macro level.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
What is it? This is a measure of your marketing spend as it relates to your customers acquired, as opposed to orders. If your customers only ever order once, your CAC and CPA may be very similar, however, if your purchase frequency is higher, then there should be a difference between the two.
How do you calculate it? Take your total (or channel level) marketing spend and divide it by the number of customers that purchased in that period.
Why should you care? To improve profitability, you want to keep an eye on your CAC and aim to reduce it. By balancing “expensive” channels with less expensive ones like SEO and email, you can reduce your overall CAC while still growing your business.
Potential pitfalls: Certain channels, especially those that are more likely to attract new customers and are higher in the sales funnel, will naturally have a higher CAC. Customer acquisition cost does not differentiate between new customers, and therefore more incremental LTV dollars.
Return on ad spend (ROAS)
What is it? This is a measure of how much revenue you are getting for every dollar you spend on marketing. Alternatively, you can also focus on profit dollars and understand how much you are getting per dollar spend.
How do you calculate it? Take revenue (or profit) and divide it by marketing spend. This can be done at a total, marketing channel, campaign or keyword level. It is usually expressed as a ratio or a percentage.
Why should you care? You want to make sure that you are making enough money from your marketing to cover your product and other costs. For example, if you have a 25% margin, you will want to target at least a 4:1 ROAS.
Potential pitfalls: While a higher ROAS may be better because it means you’re making more from each dollar invested, you should ultimately focus on how many total profit dollars you are capturing. You may be able to reduce your ROAS targets a bit and capture more total dollars because it allows you to scale.
In addition, upper funnel channels, such as paid social, will have a lower ROAS but are still very important in terms of creating awareness that can lead to very high ROAS opportunities - like more brand / trademark searches.
Advertising to Sales Ratio (A/S Ratio)
What is it? This is a comparison between how much a company spends on advertising and its sales revenue. This is generally expressed as a ratio.
How do you calculate it? Divide total advertising spend & expenses by sales revenue. We recommend using net sales to calculate this (Gross Sales less discounts).
Why should you care? As advertising attribution gets more complex, it’s helpful to watch your advertising to sales ratio to understand how your marketing investment is driving sales holistically. For example, even though you are spending in channels like paid social to drive awareness, the revenue may come through direct load or branded search. Watching A/S can help you keep an eye on macro trends.
Potential pitfalls: Not all advertising dollars will yield revenue in the same period in which your marketing campaigns run. Ensure you are measuring for a sufficiently long period and avoid knee-jerk reactions. This is especially important if your investment is heavily weighted toward awareness or upper-funnel channels or have a product with a long sales cycle.
General business metrics
Customer lifetime value (LTV)
What is it? This is the total amount a customer has spent on a website. It can be measured at an individual (e.g., John has a lifetime value of $4,500) or, more frequently, as an average across all customers. This is also typically reviewed for a given duration - for example, a three-year LTV.
How do you calculate it? For a single customer, the sum of sales dollars across all orders. As an average, the sum of all sales dollars divided by the total number of customers. It typically is most effective to cohort customers quarterly by the date of their first purchase and to leverage at least a three-year lookback period. Google Analytics also includes a Lifetime Value report in its Audience section.
Why should you care? Brands frequently fall into the trap of measuring marketing investment purely off the cost of an initial order. If a brand has a relatively low average order value (AOV) or a high customer acquisition cost in a competitive industry, it can make it difficult to scale marketing spend without looking at the cost to acquire a customer relative to their lifetime value. LTV also gives the brand a relative index on how ‘sticky’ a customer is. If LTV is increasing over time, the brand is likely making the correct marketing, product development, and/or retention investments.
Potential pitfalls: Brands who have recently been founded (or invested in a new sales channel such as eCommerce) may find LTV to be misleading because the quality of the metric benefits from a long time window. The LTV of a website launched a year ago will inevitably increase over time and it might restrict marketing investment in a period of high growth.
Customer retention rate (CRR)
What is it? The percentage of existing customers who purchased over a given period of time
How do you calculate it? To calculate your customer retention rate (CRR) you will want to measure the number of customers you have at the beginning (B) of the period, at the end (E) of the period and customers acquired during the period you're measuring (N).
The formula is: CRR = ((E-N)/B). Take the resulting number from that formula and multiply it by 100.
You can also take a look at the Cohort Analysis report in Google Analytics for additional information on your User Retention.
Why should you care? Companies can get myopically focused on acquiring new customers, but if they are experiencing a lot of churn, it can be tough to scale.
Potential pitfalls: This is best used by companies that have an automated subscription - like SaaS or even vitamins or other products that are charged on a recurring basis
Customer repurchase rate / repeat purchase rate
What is it? This is the percentage of your customers that buy from you again in a given period. It helps you understand how many customers you have that have purchased again, and in which month or period.
How do you calculate it? To calculate repurchase rate, divide the number of customers who have purchased more than once (i.e., repurchased) by the total number of customers over the same time period.
Why should you care? Acquiring a customer can be expensive, and your ability to get people to shop again - ideally through a less expensive marketing channel like email or branded search - can be key to improving your profitability over time.
Potential pitfalls: Some products may not lend themselves to repurchase, so this metric is best leveraged by those with some expectation of frequency - for example, consumable goods and clothing brands.
Purchase frequency
What is it? This is the number of times that a customer makes a purchase in a given period of time
How do you calculate it? Take the total number of orders and divide that by the number of unique customers in the same period of time. This will give you an average.
Why should you care? The higher the purchase frequency, the higher your lifetime value. In addition, if your customers purchase from you frequently, they are likely to be brand advocates which can yield significant value.
Potential pitfalls: Watch for potential resellers or other buyers that may artificially skew your data. In addition, if you offer some larger packs or sizes of a product, your frequency may be lower but your profit and AOV may be higher.
Net promoter score (NPS)
What is it? A single score that helps brands and companies understand customer satisfaction and the propensity to promote their business
How do you calculate it? NPS is captured using a survey tool that focuses on one central question - how likely are you to recommend this business to a friend or family member. Read more about NPS here.
Why should you care? Understanding customer satisfaction is key to forecasting the future growth of your business. If existing customers are dissatisfied with your product or company, they are unlikely to come back and may even be compelled to speak negatively about your business. Conversely, if you find that your customers are very satisfied, you’ll want to keep expanding your offerings in order to grow.
Potential pitfalls: The biggest challenge with NPS is sample size. If you don’t have many customers, your score may fluctuate significantly. Additionally, customer perceptions may change after using your product for a few months, so you’ll want to recapture scores to ensure that they are still satisfied.
Channel Specific KPIs
Affiliates
Number of active publishers (click)
What is it? This is a measure of the absolute number of publishers in a program that are generating clicks to your website
How do you calculate it? To track this metric, you’ll simply count the number of publishers that drove traffic. It is a standard metric available in most affiliate management platforms.
Why should you care? You may have hundreds or even thousands of websites in your affiliate program, however, many may not be driving any traffic or sales. Once you know which publishers are at least driving traffic, you can begin to engage with them to get them to drive conversions.
Number of active publishers (order)
What is it? This is a measure of the absolute number of publishers in a program that are generating orders for your website
How do you calculate it? To track this metric, you’ll simply count the number of publishers that drove orders for your website. It is a standard metric available in most affiliate management platforms.
Why should you care? You want to ensure that your order-driving affiliate publishers are increasing month over month. Many companies keep track of total affiliates, but that’s an easy number to increase - it’s harder to bring in more qualified affiliates that actually drive sales for your business.
Percent of revenue from top 10 publishers
What is it? This is the percentage of revenue in your affiliate program driven by your top 10 publishers
How do you calculate it? Take the total amount of revenue generated by your top 10 affiliates and divide that by your total affiliate revenue
Why should you care? A few publishers generally drive the lion's share of your affiliate revenue. By tracking the percent of revenue coming from your top 10, you can strive to better diversify your affiliate program in order to de-risk it and, ideally, reach new customers
Percentage of revenue from content vs. coupon affiliates
What is it? A comparison of your revenue coming from affiliates that are more likely to be upper or mid-funnel (i.e., content sites) versus lower funnel (i.e., coupon or discount sites).
How do you calculate it? Most affiliate platforms will provide a breakdown of revenue by affiliate type. Calculate the percent of revenue from each type, including content and coupon sites as part of your total program. Aim to increase revenue from sites that attract new customers.
Why should you care? The best affiliate programs have a diverse set of publishers. Since content sites (for example, educational blogs) are often more likely to attract new customers that aren’t familiar with your business, it can be helpful to measure your revenue from these sites as compared to coupon / discount affiliates.
Number of active affiliates added
What is it? The number of order-active affiliates added to your program during a given period
How do you calculate it? This is not a formula - instead, you simply want to count the number of new affiliates that produced an order in a given month or other period of your choice. Track this on a recurring basis to see how effectively you are managing your program.
Why should you care? Your goal should be to get more of your affiliates to drive sales. Watching this metric can ensure that your program is continuing to get stronger.
Display
Click-through rate (CTR)
What is it? This is a measure of the percentage of people who click on your ad as a comparison to those that are exposed to your ad. It can be measured across display, social, paid search, and many other channels.
How do you calculate it? The calculate click-through rate, take the total number of clicks divided by the total number of impressions
Why should you care? The click-through rate can be helpful in determining how engaged users are with your advertising creative and marketing message. By running various sets of ad copy or promotions simultaneously, you can gauge which is preferred by your prospects. Ultimately, you’ll want to focus on revenue, but this is a great directional statistic to watch.
Potential pitfalls: The metric is often referred to as a vanity metric as it is not tied to direct revenue. Additionally, fraud is sometimes linked to clicks which could artificially inflate the click-through rate from a Display campaign.
Percent of revenue from retargeting ads
What is it? Many companies will run retargeting or remarketing ads, but not all use display for prospecting purposes effectively. This metric allows you to keep an eye on how much of your revenue is coming from retargeting ads as opposed to upper funnel or more acquisition-oriented ads.
How do you calculate it? Take your total revenue from retargeting ads or programs (e.g., Criteo) and divide that by your total tracked revenue from display ads.
Why should you care? Retargeting ads are great because they bring in people who have previously visited your site, but they may be less incremental. Keep an eye on the percentage of revenue in your Display program that comes from retargeting as compared to your total program to ensure you have a full-funnel approach.
Email / SMS
Email open rate
What is it? This is the percentage of people who open your email after receiving it
How do you calculate it? Take the absolute number of people who open your particular email and divide that by the number of people who received that particular email to calculate your email open rate.
Why should you care? Open rates can help you identify which subject lines and audiences are likely to create initial engagement. Your best bet when trying to compare subject lines is to look at open rates across emails sent to the same audience.
Unsubscribe rate
What is it? The percentage of people that opt out of your email or SMS program during a given timeframe or for a given marketing campaign
How do you calculate it? Take the total number of people who have unsubscribed from your email or SMS program and divide it by the number of recipients. This can be measured for a given period of time (for example, a month) or for a specific email or SMS send
Why should you care? Email and SMS marketing are important parts of retaining your customers, and are often among the lowest-cost marketing you can do. While it’s unlikely that 100% of your customers will stay opted in, you want to ensure that you are sending relevant information at the right frequency to keep your file healthy. If your unsubscribe rate is too high, you may have an unqualified list, may be sending them irrelevant information, or may just be contacting them too frequently.
Number of new email / SMS subscribers
What is it? A count of the number of net new subscribers that have opted into your email or SMS program
How do you calculate it? This is an absolute measure, as opposed to a formula. Your email service provider (ESP) or SMS messaging provider should provide you with these counts.
Why should you care? Email and SMS programs are generally very profitable - they can be among your lowest cost-per-order (CPO) marketing channels. Ensuring you are consistently growing your retention programs can help offset any churn from unsubscribes while also giving you a larger base to target.
Inbox placement percentage
What is it? The percent of marketing emails sent which are successfully delivered to the recipient’s inbox (as opposed to a spam folder or quarantine). This differs from delivery rate, which is just the number of emails that were delivered as a percentage of the total sent.
How do you calculate it? This information generally comes from a provider such as Return Path, but the formula is the number of emails delivered to the inbox divided by the number of emails sent. This is often calculated by campaign.
Why should you care? Email marketers are often used to receiving a deliverability rate, but if those emails are hitting spam or another undesirable folder, the performance of the email will falter. You’ll want to ensure the emails you send are landing in the Inbox so that they are most likely to perform and drive your intended result (e.g., a sale, lead, or other action).
Revenue per 1K emails sent
What is it? A useful metric for comparing the performance of emails that are going to different list sizes. This is simply the amount of revenue driven per thousand emails that are sent.
How do you calculate it? The formula for this metric is: revenue / (sent emails/1000)
Why should you care? It can be hard to compare the performance of emails that are sent to different lists if the sizes of the files are different. This is a quick way to compare emails to see what list, offer or type of email is driving the most revenue. By comparing it to 1000 sends, it becomes a little more material than looking at pennies per send.
Click to open rate
What is it? The percentage of people who click through on your email relative to those that opened the email
How do you calculate it? Take the total number of clicks and divide that by the total number of emails that were opened
Why should you care? If you have a high open rate, but a low click-through rate, that means that the subject line was enticing but that the actual contents of the email did little to inspire the email’s recipients to act. Create a benchmark for different types of emails and use this metric to understand which layouts, offers and messages drive email recipients to navigate to your site.
Percent of revenue from triggered emails
What is it? The percentage of email revenue driven by automated, or triggered, emails as a comparison to your overall email revenue. Examples of automated or triggered emails include cart abandon, browse abandon, replenishment, and next-purchase-to-buy.
How do you calculate it? First, ensure you are tracking revenue from triggered emails separately from your normal marketing emails. Then take the percentage of revenue from your triggers and divide that by your total email revenue.
Why should you care? Triggered emails are often unsung heroes. They generally don’t get as much attention as marketing emails that feature new products or sales, but can drive a large percentage of revenue
Organic Search
Brand to non-brand revenue ratio
What is it? This is a relative measure of the percentage of your revenue from organic search branded (or trademark) terms as compared to revenue from generic terms
How do you calculate it? Google Analytics used to show revenue by keyword by default many years ago, but it’s not available as a standard metric anymore. Instead, now you’ll need to use a tool like Keyword Hero to get to revenue per keyword details, or, as a shortcut, you could use your homepage URL as a comparison against internal URLs. That method is less accurate though, because a homepage can attract non-brand terms, and internal pages can attract branded terms.
Why should you care? People who search for your brand term are most likely to already be familiar with your business. While it’s great to get these people to your website & shopping, non-brand terms are generally more likely to drive new customers and potentially higher LTV.
Google as a percent of organic traffic and sales
What is it? Google is the dominant search engine for most countries, including the USA. However, not all searches happen on that site. Measure Google relative to other search engines to ensure you are capturing your fair share from other engines like Bing.
How do you calculate it? Take organic search engine revenue from Google and divide that by total organic search engine revenue. Repeat the same for traffic (sessions or visits). You can compare the two resulting stats to understand if Google converts higher or lower than the other engines.
Why should you care? Marketers are often myopically focused on Google, but Bing and other engines can actually outperform Google for certain types of products. Watching these metrics can help you ensure that you or your team aren’t losing sight of other engines.
Number of pages indexed
What is it? This is the total number of pages showing as indexed by Google or another search engine.
How do you calculate it? This number may be found in Google’s Search Console in the Pages section under Indexing and Bing’s Webmaster tools. It is not a formula or calculation.
Why should you care? More isn’t always better. In an ideal world, the number of pages is likely to be close to the actual number of pages on your website. An inflated number may indicate that Google is seeing a lot of duplicate content, and a number that’s significantly lower than your actual pages may indicate that Google isn’t successfully crawling your website (unless your SEO team is deliberately excluding certain sections). Keep an eye on this metric to ensure that there aren’t any wild swings which may be resultant from a problem or website change.
Number of referring domains added
What is it? This is the number of new websites pointing to your site (I.e., referring domains) over a given period of time, such as a month. These new websites are seen as votes for your content.
How do you calculate it? This is not a calculated metric, but you will want to use a tool such as Ahrefs, SEMrush or other to track the number of domains. Keep in mind that you may lose some links along the way, so you’ll want to track net new additions.
Why should you care? Although content is king for SEO, links from high-quality domains are still an important signal. Ensure that you’re creating compelling content to earn these links naturally, and augment that with a strong public relations (PR) strategy.
Paid Search
Trademark to non-brand revenue ratio
What is it? This is the ratio of your revenue from branded (or trademark) keywords and shopping ads to your non-brand paid search keywords or shopping ads.
How do you calculate it? This is more difficult now if you are using Performance max, but in an ideal world you will have separate tagging for brand and non-brand campaigns across search and shopping (using query sculpting). Assuming you have that implemented, you can look at trademark revenue as a percentage of total sales to understand the ratio between trademark and non-brand.
Why should you care? Trademark (or branded) search and shopping is more likely to convert higher because they often come from people who are already familiar with your brand. If your non-brand revenue is really low, you are likely not capturing your fair share from the middle and upper funnel searches and prospective new customers. Over time, only advertising to the lower funnel may lead to lower brand / trademark search volume.
Google as a percent of paid search traffic and sales
What is it? This provides insight into your total paid search / shopping revenue and traffic from Google as compared to other search engines like Bing.
How do you calculate it? Take your total revenue from Google paid search and shopping and divide that by total paid search & shopping revenue. Repeat the same for visitors or sessions to get the comparable metric for traffic.
Why should you care? Although Google represents a massive share of the paid search & shopping market, other search engines like Bing may offer a lower incremental cost per order if you are already running at a high click share on a diverse set of keywords and products.
Traffic, sales & other KPIs by search engine
What is it? This is just a reminder to keep an eye on traffic, revenue, conversion, AOV and other key performance indicators at a search engine level for paid search.
How do you calculate it? This performance data is available directly in Google Analytics and other web analytics platforms, however, you will need to match revenue and other KPIs with spend that is captured from each search engine management platform. Your search engine marketing agency should also be able to provide this information to you in standard daily / weekly / monthly reporting.
Why should you care? Most marketers report revenue at a channel level, meaning at the Paid Search level. By keeping an eye on performance for each paid search engine, you’ll better understand your investment and be more likely to push the envelope on the smaller engines. This may yield a more profitable incremental cost per order or lead than continuing to solely invest in just one solution.
Paid Social
Performance by paid social platform
What is it? This is a reminder to avoid watching performance at a general “paid social” level, and instead to focus on reviewing performance KPIs such as traffic, revenue, CPO/CPL, conversion rate, AOV and IPT by platform (e.g., Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok)
How do you calculate it? You will want to use a single source of truth for the performance metrics outside of cost, and we recommend Google Analytics. Tag your social campaigns with unique source, medium and UTM parameters for the best data. You should also ideally create a Paid Social channel grouping in order to differentiate performance from organic social traffic.
Why should you care? When you use orders, cost per order and other metric data directly from the platforms, that data is not deduplicated - so it is often inflated. You can still look at that information for optimization purposes, but we suggest using campaign and site/platform-level data from Google Analytics to understand profitability. (Note, since this is often a middle and upper funnel tactic you will want to compare first and last-click attribution)
Referrals
Performance by referral source
What is it? This is your core performance KPIs (traffic, order, revenue, conversion rate) for each of your referral sources. Referral sources are often untracked and it can become a catch-all of sorts.
How do you calculate it? This is standard information in Google Analytics in the Acquisition > All Traffic > Referrals section.
Why should you care? Referrals is one of those channels that many people don’t bother to dig into, yet, this is where we often find revenue and sources that should be attributed elsewhere. In addition, payment methods like PayPal can be tracked to this channel if a referral exclusion is not set up in Google Analytics. This means that your marketing channel data may be overwritten at the last minute, which makes it difficult to properly value your marketing spend.
You should become familiar with referral exclusions, as well as how to adjust marketing channel grouping set up in the Admin section of Google analytics. This can help you clean up any marketing sources that inadvertently ended up in Referrals or that you want to watch more specifically. For example, if there is a top referring source that is important to your business, you may want to break it out into its own channel.
Keeping an eye on referral performance by source can ensure you are making decisions on how to handle the data, attributing marketing properly, and then using that to forecast or optimize for growth.
Shopping Ads
Number of products sent (Merchant Center)
What is it? The number of products in your data feed that are submitted to Google’s merchant center for eligibility in Google Shopping. Even if you don’t actively advertise on Google Shopping, your products have the opportunity to show up in their free listings.
How do you calculate it? This isn’t a formula. To see this information, simply log in to your Merchant Center account and go to the Products tab. You’ll want to see the number of products submitted, as well as check for any disapprovals.
Why should you care? This metric is more about ensuring that there aren’t any issues with your feed. You likely shouldn’t see a radical increase or decrease in products listed from day to day. By watching this closely, you can also keep an eye out for any disapprovals.
Performance by publisher (e.g., Google, Amazon, Bing, Instacart)
What is it? This is not a specific metric, but instead a recommendation that you keep an eye on shopping performance (e.g., revenue, profitability) across platforms.
How do you calculate it? Set up each program as a unique source / medium pairings in Google Analytics and then match performance up with spend. You can also consider customizing your channels in Google Analytics to create a Shopping or Marketplace Channel that is separate from Search.
Why should you care? Although most people focus on Google shopping and Amazon marketplace, there are quite a few other shopping related programs you can participate in. While the volume may come from the biggest platforms, you may still find profitable incremental sales on other search engines and sites.
Social Media (organic)
Performance by social source
What is it? Performance by social source is your KPIs for each organic social platform including traffic, orders, revenue, conversion.
How do you calculate it? This is available natively in the Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels report in Google analytics. Look for Social under default channel groupings and click on that link to see performance by organic social platform.
Why should you care? Social platforms cater to unique audiences - for example, LinkedIn tends to cater more to business users. By understanding your organic social performance you can get a sense of where to put your energy and also understand if users are responding to your content and driving sales or leads. Looking at this data can also help you understand what type of content to share on each site.
Number of total followers
What is it? This is a bit of a vanity metric, but helps you get an idea of how many people are interested in seeing your content on each platform (e.g., Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter)
How do you calculate it? Simply visit each social platform and track the number of followers or likes each month
Why should you care? This is best used as a comparative metric, both across social platforms and as compared to similar brands or websites. This can give you guidance on where to put your energy and to ensure that you have more people interested in hearing from you, as opposed to losing interest in your content and business.
Social engagement rate
What is it? This is the percentage of people who interact with a given post (e.g., share, like, comment)
How do you calculate it? To calculate your social engagement rate, take the total engagements a post received and divide that by the total number of impressions on the given post
Why should you care? Social engagement rate gives you a sense of what type of content resonates with your audience (or your partner / influencer’s audience). It helps you understand what you should continue producing, and what seems to be falling flat.
Video
View count
What is it? This is the total number of people who have viewed your videos. It’s a vanity metric since these views may or may not yield revenue or performance for your business, but still gives you a sense of traction on your video channels.
How do you calculate it? This is a unique metric because each platform counts views differently. It’s important to understand how each one is measured so that you can tally this information, or else you can get the data out of a third-party social management platform.
YouTube: Video count is strictest on YouTube. Someone must intentionally watch your video for 30 seconds or more in order to be counted.
Facebook: The same logic is used for both standard and live videos - it must be played for three (3) seconds or more
Instagram: Different logic is used depending on the type of video. For standard videos, the view is counted after three (3) seconds, whereas the view is counted immediately upon joining the broadcast for Live videos
Twitter: The user watches your video for two (2) seconds with at least half of the video player up on their screen
LinkedIn: Two (2) seconds with at least 50% of the video in view
TikTok: A video view counts immediately once the video starts playing in the user’s feed. This means a user does not need to take a deliberate action.
Why should you care? Although this is a bit of a vanity metric, it gives you a sense for which videos are hooking your users and getting them to actually stay engaged. Learn from this data in order to continue improving your video marketing.
Play rate
What is it? This is for embedded videos, as opposed to videos that play automatically. It’s the number of people who pressed play to start the video intentionally as compared to the number of people who had the opportunity to view it (landing page visits).
How do you calculate it? Take the number of plays and divide that by the number of visits on the page where the video is embedded. Note that you’ll have to use Google Analytics event tracking to capture this.
Why should you care? If the play rate on a given video or page is low, but you believe that the video is an important part of your sales process, you’ll want to optimize.
Optimization can come in the form of either changing the thumbnail, moving the placement of the video on the page, or looking at the content and call to actions near the video. Make sure to check both desktop and mobile so that you can make the most relevant decisions.
Watch time
What is it? This is the average length of time that users are watching your video. It’s a cumulative metric.
How do you calculate it? Calculate your average watch time by dividing the total watch time of your video by the total number of times the video was played. You should include replays in the number.
Why should you care? If users aren’t making their way through your videos, you may want to reconsider length and where you put your most important information.
Video engagement rate
What is it? These are likes and comments, similar to what you would see on other social platforms. It’s a way to gain an understanding on how interested users are when watching your video.
How do you calculate it? In order to calculate your video engagement rate, divide the total number of video engagements by the total number of times your video was seen (impressions)
Why should you care? Some videos can be expensive and time consuming to produce. By watching engagement rate, in addition to view and watch time, you can get a sense for the videos which most resonate with your audience.