Managing an online business in today’s digital market is not easy. The competition is vicious, certain markets are saturated, and with the development of different AI and automation tools, customer demands are growing rapidly.
When you wish to maintain the steady growth of your business, scale, and invest in further expansion, you need to know exactly where you are standing. This includes reading into what is your brand reputation like with customers, what is your revenue, how it changes over time, what is the customer success rate, and so much more.
Do you want to know if it is time to scale your acquisition channels and what are the best ways to do it?
In this article, we will cover what key metrics you need to follow and how you can use them to grow your online business. Ready?
Measuring Online Business Success—The Why and the How
Knowing how their own business develops is something every entrepreneur wants to know. There are two ways of understanding your company’s success: how you progress within your own timeline, and how fast you grow in comparison to your competitors.
There are different metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) that allow you to gain a better understanding of the strong and weak sides of your online business, and use those analytics to make informative decisions. Here is how you can use the results to measure your business success.
Improving existing products and services
First of all, when you are analyzing how well your business is standing, you are measuring customer satisfaction rate. This means that your most valuable insights will be how well are your customers responding to the products or services you are offering.
A deeper understanding of these metrics will also help you capture what aspects of your product/service are satisfactory, and which might use a little improvement. You can use customer surveys to obtain this information quickly and on a regular basis.
Optimizing current sales and marketing strategies
Sales and marketing departments need to be up to date with all emerging trends and day-to-day data on customer behavior and tendencies. Understanding how your customer interacts with your brand is the first step to improving ongoing strategies and adapting them to the current state.
Behavioral data can help these teams target the customer’s sweet spot when they launch their next campaign or surf on the newest TikTok trend that resonates with your brand values. It can also help them discover potential partner brands and influencers to boost reach and engagement.
Attract new investors
Stats and numbers have always been interesting to the stakeholders, and this is the case in almost every industry. Your investors are interested in numbers, and analyzing digital metrics of your business success will prepare you for a pitch every day.
Do you have a networking event scheduled for next week? No problem. Check the latest reports and flash the sparkling numbers to potential investors you come across. A level of nonchalance that goes with being ready at all times shines with confidence is attractive in its own right.
Improve User Experience
Since your website is where it all happens–the core of your sales funnel, optimizing website functionalities, performance, and user experience is essential to improve your relationships with online customers.
Most metrics you will follow come from web analytics. This is why making an ultimate user experience and improving different segments of your site are the easiest first steps to take when scaling your business and investing in your online shop.
Thinking ahead–future steps in the company
Knowing how successful your online business is provides you with enough insights that allow you to plan your company development for the following years.
With a holistic approach, you can organize strategic meetings and pivot new ideas, experiment with different partnerships, and make decisions that keep your business growing.
Do you need help utilizing the right digital metrics for business growth?
Contact Growth Hackers
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to Track in Your Growth Strategy
Different businesses track different types of data. Sometimes, the metrics you gather can be overwhelming, since not all are relevant to your niche, marketing channels, and target audience.
For example, tracking SEO-related metrics on your website doesn’t make much sense if your key selling point is your Shopify store. In this case, you need to follow all metrics related to your Shopify business–visits, conversion, and the keywords related to your Shopify about us page.
Here is the list of KPIs you can select from and track the relevant ones to indicate the progress of your business. We will divide them into two categories–sales and marketing.
Sales
Sales metrics help you understand which sales techniques are effective in your online strategy.
- Product affinity – which products are purchased together
- Average order value – the average price of the shopping cart
- Sales – number of sales made over a certain period
- Conversion rate – how many visitors actually complete the purchase
- Shop cart abandonment rate – the number of users that leave their shopping carts
- Number and quality of product reviews – the amount and quality of reviews each product receives
- Customer lifetime value (LTV) – how much worth a single customer brings to your brand over the course of the entire interaction
- Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) – how much do you spend on average to acquire a new customer
- Gross profit – over a period of time
- Average margin – the percentage of your profit margin over a period of time
- Costs of goods sold – how much do you spend on the goods you are selling
- Competitive Pricing – how much your competitors charge for the same/similar product
Marketing
Marketing analytics are helpful to understand which marketing campaigns have the biggest return on investment (ROI)–affiliate marketing, referral marketing, PPC, SEO, or social media.
- Traffic source – where your audience comes from
- Site speed – how fast the website loads
- Mobile site traffic – how much traffic your website gets from mobile devices
- Traffic (new VS returning) – the ratio between old and new visitors
- Conversion rate – the number of visitors who decided to make a purchase
- Bounce rate – the percentage of users who see one page and decide to leave your website
- Referral traffic – traffic that comes from personal recommendations online
- Click-through-rate (CTR) – the percentage of page visitors that click on a link
- Pay-per-click (PPC) – the total traffic you get from a pay-per-click campaign
- Pageviews – the total number of views each page on your site gets
- Average time spent on your site (or specific landing page) – it indicates how long people spend on your site or page, as an average
- Email open rate – the percentage of delivered emails that have been opened
- Social followers – the number of followers you have across different social media channels
- Blog Traffic – the total traffic of your blog posts
- Banner or display advertising CTRs – the percentage of page viewers that have clicked on a banner or display commercial on your site
- Affiliate performance – the number of sales you make through the affiliate partnerships aka which partners are worth the investment
- Average position in search – how high you stand in Google search for a specific keyword
Managing a large amount of data can be exhausting, especially if you obtain the data from multiple platforms. An ELT pipeline helps with extracting, moving, and transforming all data to your system, helping you have all the information in one place. ELT stands for Extract, Load and Transform.
Another useful strategy for analyzing collected data is using data visualization. If you create visual reports, they will not only make it easier for your team to catch the essence of the customer behavior but also help your investors get a clear picture of your business progress.
Master the art of analyzing digital metrics and propel your business to success!
Analytics Tools for Measuring Your Business Growth
To ensure you have real and reliable data in your hands, you need to use the right tools. Here are our top three recommendations for a starter kit for tracking your digital metrics.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the number one tool for learning how your business performs online. With the launch of its new version, Google Analytics 4 (GA4), Google keeps standing on top of the game when it comes to online business stats.
If you haven’t started yet, GA4 offers comprehensive insights on customer interaction with your website and helps you manage Google ads in an effective way, targeting the specific group you need.
For example, when you launch a new product, Google Analytics helps you obtain information such as the number of visits to the product page, the source of these visits, and the engagement of each user (metrics such as traffic, traffic source, etc.).
Amazon Attribution Tool
For online shops present on Amazon, this tool will revolutionize your knowledge of customer conversion. Amazon Attribution Tool is a tool that measures your Amazon performance based on the traffic outside of Amazon.
This tool can track metrics such as product page views, purchases, and sales, enabling you to understand your conversion rates and detect which marketing strategies are more effective.
For example, in the testing phase of a new marketing strategy such as affiliate marketing with a new partner, you can track how many leads you got from the links on your partner’s social profiles. You can also track how many of those clicks resulted in a purchase, and calculate the ROI to keep or drop the partnership.
Ahrefs
SEO is one of the pillars of contemporary marketing strategies for online businesses, and it plays a big role in attracting new visitors to your site.
This is why an SEO tool such as Ahrefs can be very handy in following metrics such as website traffic, domain rank, website value, popular pages and clicks, referral websites, and organic keywords.
Furthermore, you can analyze keywords and other elements to improve your website content.
Closing Thoughts about Utilizing the Right Digital Metrics for Business Growth
Good business management and strategy depend highly on understanding the ongoing situation and needs of your business. Regularly scanning and analyzing digital metrics related to your online brand will help you determine if you need to improve your product, outsource an SEO team, or develop a new prototype to test and scale your company.
Growth Hackers is quite famous for being one of the top growth marketing companies helping businesses from all over the world grow. There is no fluff with Growth Hackers. We help entrepreneurs and business owners unlock success with digital metrics, increase their productivity, generate qualified leads, optimize their conversion rate, gather and analyze data analytics, acquire and retain users and increase sales. We go further than brand awareness and exposure. We make sure that the strategies we implement move the needle so your business grow, strive and succeed. If you too want your business to reach new heights, contact Growth Hackers today so we can discuss about your brand and create a custom growth plan for you. You’re just one click away to skyrocket your business.
