7 Ecommerce KPIs You Should Be Measuring (and How to Optimize Them)

Long-term, sustainable growth is the primary goal of most ecommerce businesses. The best way to support that growth is analyzing the data that your business generates through interactions with customers, whether that’s a page visit, a purchase, or even a product return. 

If you aren’t analyzing your data, you are ignoring an exceptional resource for growing your business. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), which provide measurable values that demonstrate how effectively a company is achieving key business objectives, are at the heart of data analysis. 

This article focuses on seven KPIs you should be analyzing across the entire customer journey of acquisition, conversion, and retention:

• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
• Website Traffic by Channel
• Conversion Rate (CR)
• Average Order Value (AOV)
• Cart Abandonment Rate (CAR)
• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
• Customer Retention Rate (CRR)

This guide breaks down these seven most essential KPIs your store should be measuring and provides actionable optimization strategies to increase revenue and sustainable growth. 

As you evaluate your metrics, also consider whether your hosting platform is supporting your growth. A high-performance managed host like Pressable provides the speed, scalability, and reliability that help improve key metrics like conversion rate and customer retention.

The 7 Essential Ecommerce KPIs and Optimization Strategies

Acquisition KPIs (Building Traffic)

• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): This is the total cost of marketing and sales needed to acquire one new customer. To improve your CAC, focus on channels with the highest ROI. Also, consider implementing better audience targeting to reduce ad spend waste.
• Website Traffic by Channel: This KPI helps you understand where your traffic is coming from, whether it is organic, comes from paid search, through social media, or through direct interaction. A good approach is to double down on your highest-performing channel. For lower-performing channels, carefully consider appropriate budget allocation and strategy rather than oversupport channels that aren’t delivering.

Conversion KPIs (Changing Visitor into Buyers)

• Conversion Rate (CR): This KPI refers to the percentage of visitors who complete a purchase. The best way to improve this KPI is by running A/B tests on product pages and CTAs. Other ways to improve CR include optimizing page load speed and simplifying the checkout process.
• Average Order Value (AOV): This is the average dollar amount spent per customer order. To improve your AOV, implement strategic upselling and cross-selling on the cart page (or post-purchase). Another helpful strategy is offering free shipping thresholds that are just above the current AOV to help drive it higher.
• Cart Abandonment Rate (CAR): This KPI identifies the percentage of shoppers who add items to their cart but leave before completing their purchase. To improve this KPI, send automated cart abandonment emails to customers that walk away from a purchase. It also helps to be transparent about shipping costs early in the purchase process so customers don’t suddenly get cold feet when they see the shipping cost added on. As an experienced managed host provider, Pressable offers some additional strategies for improving your CAR KPI. 

Retention KPIs (Keeping Customers)

• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): This KPI focuses on the total revenue a business can reasonably expect from a single customer account throughout the relationship. The best way to raise this KPI is through the use of loyalty programs. Other ways to improve your CLV include fine-tuning your post-purchase communication to confirm they have had a good experience and offering personalized promotions based on past purchases.
• Customer Retention Rate (CRR): This is the percentage of existing customers who make another purchase during a specific period of time. You can increase your CRR by improving your customer service responsiveness. Also, try creating a subscription model for consumable products so you have a route to keep customers purchasing on an ongoing-basis.

Tools and Strategies for Measuring KPIs

• Analytics Hub: Software suites such as Google Analytics 4 (GA4) or platforms like Adobe Analytics help ecommerce business owners organize their KPI data to help uncover insights by tracking site traffic and conversion events.
• Platform Integration: Ensure that your ecommerce platform (such as WooCommerce, a great match with Pressable) is properly integrated with your analytics tool. Integration allows for quick, easy, and accurate tracking of your revenue and order data.
• Data Visualization: When only considering numbers, insights aren’t always obvious. Being able to visualize your data through charts and graphs makes it much easier to identify what exactly your data is telling you. Consider dashboards such as Google Looker Studio or internal Customer Relationship Management (CRM) reports to help you visualize your KPIs quickly and make them actionable for your team.
• Actionable Insights: Tracking and measuring your data is a great practice, but it means nothing if you are not then taking action on the insights you gain from analyzing that data. Practices such as A/B tests, UX adjustments, content optimization, and funnel adjustments provide processes that can effectively drive the changes you need to make to improve your ecommerce business.

Analyze Your Data and Act On It

If you are looking to operate a successful ecommerce business, effective data analysis is a key practice to follow. In every step of the customer journey through acquisition, conversion, and retention, there is valuable data available to help you improve your business. Focusing on these seven KPIs offers the most direct path to growing your business. 

Implementing a data-driven approach to how you run your ecommerce business provides clarity, predictability, and the necessary tools to scale sustainably. 

If you are not analyzing your data or feel you need to reassess how you are using data, now is the time to audit your current reporting, choose the right tools, and start tracking and optimizing these essential ecommerce KPIs today.

Pressable: The Perfect WooCommerce Partner

Pressable understands the importance of analyzing data and reviewing KPIs. We provide built-in tools such as our Site Performance Reports that offer a dashboard overview of your site’s performance, accessibility, and SEO. In addition, we also integrate with third party plugins including Site Kit from Google, MonsterInsights, and ExactMetrics to make it easy to access and analyze your site’s data.

Pressable—part of the Automattic family that also includes WordPress.com, WordPress VIP, and WooCommerce—is staffed by WordPress experts with the skills and knowledge to effectively manage your WordPress site. If you’re thinking about switching to managed WordPress hosting, schedule a demo to see how Pressable can support your continued optimization and growth.

Phillip Clapham

Hi! I’m Phill — WordPress whisperer, open-source crusader, and recovering rockstar turned Technical Account Manager at Pressable. Once a touring musician, now a web-slinging polymath, I blend creativity, curiosity, and a bit of chaos to help make the internet a friendlier, faster, and more inclusive place. My heart beats for WordPress — not just as a platform, but as a living, breathing ecosystem powered by community, collaboration, and code. I’m here to help it thrive. I believe information wants to be free, good ideas deserve good hosting, and the web works best when it’s built with soul. Whether I’m debugging a WooCommerce bottleneck, guiding a site migration, or just jamming with the open-source tribe, I bring clarity, compassion, and a dash of mischief to every line of code and customer conversation. Outside the matrix? I’m a happy husband, dog dad, and feline minion wrangler. I road trip to nowhere in particular, cook like a chemist, read like a fiend, and occasionally perform reality-bending experiments in thought, tech, and art. Let’s build a web — and a world — worth connecting to.