If you want your online business to succeed, you really need to know your numbers. This means more than knowing how much profit you are likely to make (although this is very useful) but also many of the key figures within your business, like traffic numbers, bounce rates, conversion rates, and how many people are leaving a full cart behind and going elsewhere.
Getting hold of the tools to analyze your business might seem like an unnecessary cost, and spending time looking at that data might seem like time away from the core tasks of making sales, but as soon as you see the amount of money you are potentially leaving on the table for the sake of one or two easy fixes, you might well consider it worthwhile.
Measuring the key factors within your online business
Depending on what type of business model you use, there will be a variation in the things that you measure, or at least how you prioritize looking at them. Regardless of your business model, though, you will need the best software available for extracting, transforming, analyzing, and modeling data and the right training to use those tools to make effective data-driven decisions about the key areas of your business to improve.
This can identify easy-to-solve problems on the first pass, like, for example, bounce rates on the pages for your new products because the images were too large and took too long to load. You can also look at the effectiveness of your various traffic gathering methods and identify which ones are the most effective and those that you could probably let slide.
Putting remedial action in place – example: abandoned carts
One problem you might have is abandoned carts. Or, to be more accurate, one problem you will have on any eCommerce website is cart abandonment; you probably just don’t know how bad. If a figure of as high as 69% (desktop) or 85% (mobile) doesn’t make you sit up and take notice, you might not see out 2021 as a business owner. Even if your rate was as low as 20%, if you just imagine an extra 20% added to your revenue, you can see how much is at stake.
It can be for a variety of reasons, like customers coming in from areas you don’t ship to, or delivery costs and transit times coming as an unwelcome surprise at the end, and the customer going elsewhere in search of free shipping. Again, the problem might be some or all of these things, or even something completely different, but you won’t know until you start to measure and analyze your business.
A few final thoughts
The key to improving your business can all be in the numbers. However, knowing what numbers to look at and what to do with the results can be the difference between success and failure. By using the best tools available and using them to prioritize the areas where the biggest improvements can be made, you can make positive changes, all without increasing any of your marketing budgets.
