If you are in any kind of business, you know the importance of data. Data will define your success and clue you in to areas of growth. Having the key metrics available to you will give you clues to your business that no other aspects can. Analyzing your numbers will answer questions about where your actuals are trending against projections. What is your profit margin for each new customer? What is the long-term value of that customer? Are you breaking even and, if not, when do you expect to break even?

The key performance indicators (or KPIs), specific to e-commerce that will allow you to answer and address these questions include: 

• Site traffic metrics – Such as number of visitors (daily, weekly and monthly visits); Click per visit for various channel; visits with transactions (if appropriate); social traffic

• Average page views and time on site – This metric will help you identify whether or not your content is engaging and how targeted your web traffic is.

• Unique page views v. returning visitors – It is less costly to retain an existing customer than it is to acquire a new customer, so this metric will help you analyze how well your retention strategy is working.

• Exit pages – What pages are your customers leaving on? Focus on improving engagement on those pages specifically and consider what it is about those top pages that are turning people off.

• Net profit – This metric must be analyzed overall and for each marketing channel. This will help you understand the profitability of your business. However, you must also consider channels that influence or drive people to your business, but may not have the “revenue” allocated directly to that channel.

• For example, if you are doing radio spots, you will not know what purchases or sign-ups come directly from the radio’s influence, but it can greatly impact people’s choice to engage with your organization.  

• Average order value – This metric is key to understand especially if you are an e-commerce site. This can lead you to develop strategies to increase customer orders/engagement for future purchases.

These are some of the key indicators for online, e-commerce based businesses in the peer-to-peer marketplace space.  However, if you do not understand how your numbers relate to the historical trend and future projections, then they will likely seem meaningless. It is important to acquire historical data to compare your actuals against, and ultimately, to base projections off of. Once you have a working data set and have identified the KPIs critical to your business, you will have the tools to answer the questions posed here and many others.

Part of the Near Me product includes detailed analytical information regarding your web page, enlightening you to many of the back end information. Besides managing the IT needs of your peer-to-peer marketplace, Near Me will provide you with the information needed to answer the critical questions regarding the success and profitability of your organization.  

What KPIs do you prioritize in your analysis?