What are the Top 25 KPIs for eCommerce Stores?

As an ecommerce business owner, you know that data and analytics are the keys to driving growth and improving your store's performance. But with so many potential metrics to track, it can be overwhelming to determine which Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are truly the most important for your business.

In this comprehensive guide, we'll dive into the top 20 KPIs that every ecommerce store should be monitoring. We'll cover metrics across four key areas - your overall business strategy, your ecommerce platform, your analytics tools, and your advertising platforms. By the end, you'll have a clear roadmap for building a robust reporting system to take your online store to new heights.

KPIs from Your Business Strategy

The foundation of any successful ecommerce reporting system starts with aligning your KPIs to your overall business strategy. These high-level metrics will help you track progress towards your company's key objectives, whether that's maximizing profitability, driving customer loyalty, or optimizing inventory management.

1. Profit per Customer: How much profit are you generating from each individual customer? This is a crucial metric for understanding the lifetime value of your customers and identifying your most profitable segments.
2. Gross Margin on Sales: What percentage of your revenue is turning into actual profit after accounting for the cost of goods sold? Monitoring your gross margins can help you identify opportunities to improve pricing, reduce costs, or shift your product mix.
3. Sales Forecasting by Month: Accurately projecting your future sales by month or quarter is essential for planning inventory, staffing, and other operational needs. Historical sales data combined with market trends can provide valuable forecasting insights.
4. Inventory Projections: Closely related to sales forecasting, monitoring your inventory levels and projecting future needs can help you avoid stockouts or excess inventory that ties up capital.
5. Profit & Loss Analysis: Regularly reviewing your profit and loss statement gives you a high-level view of your company's financial health and profitability. This can inform strategic decisions around pricing, expenses, and investment. Choosing the right KPIs from this category will depend on your specific business goals and priorities. The key is to select 1-2 metrics that are truly mission-critical, and then build the rest of your reporting system around supporting those high-level objectives.

KPIs from Your Ecommerce Platform

In addition to the strategic metrics above, your ecommerce platform itself will provide a wealth of valuable data to track. These operational KPIs can give you deep visibility into your sales performance, customer behavior, and product-level insights.

1. Total Revenue: This is the foundational metric for tracking your overall sales performance. Slice and dice it by day, week, month, or year to identify trends and seasonal patterns.
2. Product Revenue: Understand which of your products are driving the most sales. This can inform decisions around inventory, merchandising, and product development.
3. Product Category Revenue: Analyze sales by product category to identify your best-performing and most profitable segments.
4. Customer Loyalty: Track metrics like repeat purchase rate and customer lifetime value
5. Subscription revenue: Gauge the strength of your customer relationships.
6. Coupon Usage + Average Discounts: Monitor the impact of discounts and promotions on your average order value and profit margins. This can help you strike the right balance between customer acquisition and profitability. These ecommerce platform KPIs provide the granular, operational data you need to make informed, data-driven decisions about your online store. By combining them with the higher-level strategic metrics, you'll have a comprehensive view of your business performance.

KPIs from Google Analytics

While your ecommerce platform is the system of record for sales and customer data, Google Analytics is the gold standard for understanding user behavior and the customer journey on your website. These analytics-driven KPIs can shed light on critical areas like conversion rate, traffic sources, and attribution.

1. Ecommerce Conversions: What percentage of your website visitors are actually converting into paying customers? This core metric can help you identify friction points in your checkout process and opportunities to improve user experience.

2. Conversion Rate: Similar to ecommerce conversions, your overall website conversion rate provides a high-level gauge of how effectively you're turning traffic into sales.

3. Attribution Modeling for Ad Spends: Understand the complex customer journey by analyzing how different marketing channels and touchpoints contribute to conversions. This can inform smarter budget allocation across your advertising and promotional efforts.

4. Traffic Sources: Dig into the specific channels driving visitors to your site like

5. **Organic search **

6. **Paid Ads **

7. Email Marketing

8. **Social Influencers and referrals. ** Optimizing your mix of traffic sources is key to sustainable growth

9. Google Analytics 4: As Google phases out Universal Analytics, make sure your reporting is set up to take advantage of the enhanced capabilities of Google Analytics 4. This next-generation platform offers more robust ecommerce tracking and cross-device measurement. The insights from Google Analytics can be a powerful complement to the data from your ecommerce platform. By aligning these two data sources, you'll get a holistic view of your customer behavior and marketing performance.

KPIs from Advertising Platforms

Finally, no ecommerce reporting system would be complete without visibility into the performance of your advertising and promotional efforts. These KPIs from your ad platforms can help you optimize your marketing spend and identify your most effective customer acquisition channels.

1. Advertising Conversions: Track the number of sales and revenue generated directly from your paid advertising campaigns. This can help you calculate your true return on ad spend (ROAS).
2. Advertising Revenue: While not a perfect proxy for actual revenue, advertising revenue metrics can still provide valuable insights into the overall performance of your paid marketing initiatives.
3. Bid Strategy: Analyze the effectiveness of your bidding approach across search, social, and other advertising channels. This can uncover opportunities to improve efficiency and profitability.
4. Impression Share: Understand what percentage of available impressions your ads are capturing in your target markets. This can inform decisions around budget allocation and audience targeting. By tying these advertising KPIs back to your overall business strategy and ecommerce platform data, you can make more informed decisions about where to invest your marketing dollars for maximum impact.

Putting It All Together

Now that we've covered the top 20 KPIs for ecommerce stores, the key is to select the metrics that are most closely aligned with your unique business goals and priorities. As the saying goes, "what gets measured, gets managed" - so choose wisely and focus on the KPIs that will provide the most meaningful, actionable insights.

Remember, the goal is not to track every single metric under the sun. In fact, as we mentioned earlier, too many KPIs can actually lead to more confusion than clarity. Instead, aim to identify 5-10 core metrics that truly move the needle for your business, and then build the rest of your reporting around supporting those key performance indicators.

By taking a strategic, data-driven approach to ecommerce analytics, you'll be well on your way to unlocking the insights you need to drive sustainable growth and profitability for your online store. Happy measuring!