Before you go through this guide, it’s best to review the different types of metrics you’ll be using to measure your success. Of course, you’ll need to have web analytics software such as Google Analytics (with eCommerce Tracking set up) so that you’ll know your current metrics and how your changes will measure up.
Here are the essential metrics you need to be familiar with to increase sales online:
Leads to increase sales online
Your leads are simply the people who have expressed active interest in your products or services. Unlike your typical website visitor, they have given you their name or contact information, as well as permission to send them additional information. They’re the first major step in your online sales funnel, which you can learn more about in this tutorial and increase sales online:
Here are some of the ways you can use to count your number of leads:
- Email subscribers.If you collect email addresses for a mailing list or newsletter, your number of subscribers is your list of leads.
- Registered users.You can invite users to register to your online store or website, even before they’re ready to buy. For example, if you’ve ever created an account on one fo the online retail stores like Amazon, Etsy, or Walmart without buying anything, you’re already one of their leads.
- Contact form submissions.If your site has a contact form that users tend to fill out to ask you more questions about your business or initiate purchases, these count as leads.
- Quote requests. Requests for quotes typically applies to services. Whether you provide garden maintenance or website development, odds are potential clients have contacted you in an attempt to get an estimate on what their project would cost. These potential clients are your leads.
- A combination of the above.You can use all of the above ways to gather leads. Just make sure that with each channel you use, you have a way to easily keep track of the number of leads you have per channel.
If your online shop is new, these leads will be easy to count and keep track of manually. But as your customer base grows, you’ll need to find specific tools for measuring your leads depending on how you gather them. This could be through email marketing software or your website analytics program.
Conversion Rate
Your conversion rate is based on what you want users to do on a specific page. It’s the number of visitors who perform the action you want divided by the number of visitors who don’t.
Let’s say you’re looking to improve the conversions on a specific product page. To compute your conversion rate for the month, look at the number of unique visitors that clicked on the “Buy Now” button on that page throughout the month. Then, divide it by the total number of unique visitors on that page for the same month. If your product page received 200 unique visitors, but only 10 clicked on the “Buy Now” button, then your conversion rate is 5-percent.
Your goal could also be to increase the number of leads you get. If you’re measuring email subscribers to your newsletter, you can create a squeeze page to capture email addresses. Get your overall conversion rate by comparing the number of subscribers you get from that page with the total number of visitors to that page.
Since your goal for each page on your site will be different, you have many options for measuring your conversion rates.
Bounce Rate and Exit Rate
Your bounce rates and exit rates will give you an idea about how many people leave your website or a specific page. It’s important to know the difference between the two so that you can tell which you should use for each situation.
Bounce Rate
Your site’s bounce rate is the percentage of your visitors who view just one page on your site, then leave. For example, a squeeze page with a high bounce rate and a high conversion rate is a good thing. This means that once a user lands on the page, the majority of them do the action you want them to do, whether it’s making a purchase or signing up for your mailing list. But if your goal is to get visitors to browse through your product catalogue, a high bounce rate indicates that most visitors probably didn’t dig deeper into your products.
Exit Rate
The exit rate of a page, however, is the percentage of users who leave your website from that page—regardless of how many other pages they visited beforehand. You can make sense of your exit rate by looking at your users’ behavior throughout your website and seeing how they navigate through it. If you use Google Analytics, you can find this under your “Users Flow” report.