The holidays are coming up quickly. This is the best time of the year for your customers, who are buying gifts for their friends and families. On the other hand, this is your busiest and, hopefully, most profitable time of year.
You’ve probably already started getting your Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Green Monday, and Christmas content, design, deals, and products ready. But this is not enough to get the most out of your sales. To get the most out of your online store during the holidays, you should keep an eye on how it’s doing and fix any problems right away.
Here are a few numbers that every online store owner should keep an eye on during the holidays.
Website Uptime
The uptime of your website tells you how well it works. It tells you when your website isn’t doing as well as it should because there are more people visiting it. Now is the time of year when more people want your products, so it makes sense that your traffic will go up.
If your website can’t handle the extra traffic, your users’ experiences and sales will go down. No one wants to waste their time on a website that keeps going down. By keeping an eye on this metric, you can predict possible performance problems and fix them more quickly. Here, you could use tools like Observu, Uptime, WebGazer, Uptime Robot, and Sites 247 to keep an eye on your website.
Page Load Speed
Just like its mere name implies, page load time tells you how long it takes for your website page to load. Some recent statistics show that most of your customers will ditch your website if it doesn’t load in 3 seconds, while the majority of them expect your site to load in less than 2 seconds. Moreover, a 1-second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.
Therefore, if your site loads slowly for only 15 minutes during high-traffic days like Black Friday or Green Monday, you could lose a notable amount of revenue.
Given that, it’s not surprising at all that minimizing your page load time should be your priority, especially during the holiday season. There are numerous tools that will help you measure your page load time, such as Pingdom Speed Test, Google PageSpeed Insights, WebPageTest, GTmetrix, etc. Most of these tools work in a pretty simple way – you type your URL into the search box and the software will tell you how well your page performs. Google PageSpeed Insights will also provide some additional tips on how to improve website speed.
Average Order Value
The average order value is how much your customers spend on average when they buy something from your site. This is a key metric that helps you figure out why your customers buy from you.
There are a few things to remember, though. First, you’ll offer great deals on Black Friday or Cyber Monday, which could lower your AOV by a lot. Second, the AOV during the Christmas season also depends on the devices your customers use. A strategist at IBM named Justin Norwood says that online shoppers don’t buy as many items on their phones as they do on their desktop computers, laptops, or tablets. Because of this, your average order value may go down on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, when a lot of people buy cell phones.
It’s easy to figure out your AOV. Divide your total income by how many orders you’ve had. You can figure out your average order value every month, every day, or every week.
Rate of Leaving Shopping Carts
The shopping cart abandonment rate is the number of people who put an item from your website in their shopping cart but then leave it there without making a purchase. A study by the Baymard Institute found that 70% of shopping carts are left empty on average. When people leave their shopping carts, it means something is wrong with your website. This is a sign that you should check how well your website is running and get it ready for the holidays. Most importantly, Christmas is a great time to reach out to customers who abandoned their shopping carts, offer them great deals, and encourage them to finish the purchase.
To figure out the shopping cart abandonment rate, divide the number of completed purchases by the number of shopping carts. To see the answer in percentages, multiply the number you get by 100. If you use the enhanced ecommerce plugin for Google Analytics, you can keep an eye on and track how many people abandon their shopping carts right there. Go to Conversions > Ecommerce > Shopping Behavior to see a picture of your sales funnel and the percentage of buyers who finished their purchase or gave up at each stage of the funnel.
On-Site Keywords
Your goal when optimizing your site for the right keywords is to figure out what they were looking for. Customers who use your search box and type in keywords to find what they want to buy already know what they want to buy. So, you want to know what phrases they use to search and if these searches lead to purchases. This will help you find better keywords and make your content and products easier to find.
Google Analytics or other tools like it can be used to track the search terms people use to find your website. You can also use a digital marketing reporting tool to combine the features of the analytics tools you use to learn more about your keywords.
Customer Lifetime Value
Customer lifetime value is the total amount of money a customer brings to your online store over the course of their life. When you know the lifetime value of a customer, you can see if your marketing costs are worth it based on how much money you make from that customer.
Say that your average order is $60 and that the average customer buys 10 times at that price. So, if they last 10 years, they are worth $60 x 10 = $600. Google Analytics can also be used to figure out the customer lifetime value. You only have to click Audience > Lifetime Value.
Total Income and Income by Source of Traffic
To put it simply, total revenue is the sum of all the sales that have been made on your ecommerce site. It’s important to keep track of your total revenue, especially during the holidays, because it shows how well and how healthy your business is as a whole.
Now that you know how much money you made in total, why not divide it up by where your visitors came from? This method is more precise and shows you which channels make you the most money and which ones don’t make you enough money. For example, you can divide your income by organic traffic, email campaigns, referral traffic, and so on by going to Google Analytics > Traffic. You can learn a lot about how customers buy things from these insights. For example, you may notice that Instagram sends you a lot of referrals, but the average order value from Instagram is low. On the other hand, your email marketing campaigns may have a lower conversion rate but a high AOV.
Social Sentiment
When you measure social sentiment, you want to find out what your customers think of you. It can be good or bad, or it can be neutral. During the holidays, it’s very important to keep track of how people feel online. This is when your customers’ expectations are high, and any bad experiences they have could have a direct effect on how engaged they are and how often they buy from you. With this KPI, it’s easy to note any bad experiences and take care of them right away. Instead of ignoring negative feedback, think of it as a chance to improve user experiences and turn a critic into a brand advocate during the busy holiday season.
There are many social media monitoring tools, like Mention, Social Mention, and Hootsuite, that let you track mentions of your brand and products in real time. It’s much easier to automate social listening than to manually track and measure your mentions, which would give you less accurate results.
Your turn
During the holidays, it’s hard to meet the needs of your picky customers. You need a lot of data to figure out which marketing strategies work and which ones don’t. Start by avoiding vanity metrics, which make you feel good about what you’ve done but don’t tell you anything about how well your store is doing. During the holiday season, you need to pay attention to the right metrics that will give you helpful information and point you in the right direction.