How to Build an E-commerce KPI Dashboard

If you’re in the e-commerce business, you’re aware of how important data is. However, you’ll be just as aware of the sheer amount of data, and have some trouble finding out what is relevant and what isn’t. To get a grasp, it’s important to define the most important KPIs for your e-commerce business, and implement them in a way that is clear and concise. E-commerce dashboards are the perfect way to achieve that.

But why would you use e-commerce dashboards? The short answer is that insightful dashboards will help e-commerce businesses optimize their revenue.

Benefits of an e-commerce KPI dashboard

Discover strengths and weaknesses

Using a data-driven approach will reveal what you’re excelling at and which specific things might be holding you back. This might confirm things you already thought, or it could also help you find out things that might not be obvious with other approaches.

Optimize your content or ads

Having well-defined KPIs helps you to improve the content you produce or the advertisements you publish to guarantee a maximum return on your efforts. Understanding the inbound traffic they generate is vitally important for any e-commerce business. A KPI dashboard is one of the tools that can help with that.

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How to gather e-commerce data

As with any visualization project, you’ll first need to gather your e-commerce data. Your data can be spread across different platforms such as Google Analytics for website statistics, or e-commerce platforms such as Shopify, Magento or WooCommerce. Or maybe you already store some of your e-commerce data in a database. Thankfully, there are numerous tools available to help you streamline this process, including Shopify blog apps.

If you’re gathering data from multiple sources for reporting purposes, a data warehouse can be a good solution. You could look into data warehouses that integrate with your specific e-commerce stack, like a data warehouse for Shopify.

Once you have a clear idea of your data stack, you can start thinking of the exact e-commerce metrics you would like to measure and track over time. Also you can use the best email marketing platform for ecommerce to track your metrics and manage your campaign accordingly.

Common e-commerce KPIs

As it became clear in the introduction, ecommerce KPIs are useful to optimize your webshop, but which are the metrics you should be using? That depends on the specifics of your business of course, but here are a couple to get you started

1. Bounce rate

The bounce rate is a very important metric for any website; it means how many of the users on your site visit just one page and then leave. If you keep an eye on the bounce rate of the different pages on your e-commerce site you can use that information to keep users on your site for longer – which translates to more sales. However, analyzing bounce rate data and implementing effective strategies to improve it can be complex. Consider partnering with an e-commerce conversion rate optimization agency.

2. Incoming traffic sources

The visitors of your site can come from many possible websites and portals, and understanding how they find you is important. A low share from search engines might mean your SEO isn’t up to snuff. A high share of a certain website might show you an audience you previously weren’t aware of. Information like this can massively help you optimise your webshop, and e-commerce dashboards can help you to understand it. It may be worth going after long-tail keywords instead of primary keywords. For example, going after "home phone service in Georgia" will be much easier to rank for in comparison to "home phone service.

3. Average time on page

The average time on page is a KPI that helps you understand which pages that are more engaging to visitors. Using this information in your e-commerce dashboards can help you optimise your website – and get more sales.

4. Pages per session

This KPI can tell you a lot about how well you keep visitors on your site. A low number of pages per session can mean you’re missing out on cross-selling opportunities or that the way your site is structured doesn’t entice people to visit another page.

5. Cart abandonment rate

Cart abandonment rate is the percentage of people who add an item to their cart who don’t end up buying it. Because your revenue comes from people purchasing things from your platform it is important to minimise this as much as possible. A KPI dashboard will help you keep an eye on this and enables you to optimise your site for a lower cart abandonment rate. To minimize the cart abandomenet rate, consider using a hosted shopping cart that offers simplified checkout processes, guest checkout options, saved carts, and abandoned cart recovery mechanisms.

6. Average value per order

The average value per order is something to keep an eye on – a slight dip can cause a significant drop in revenue. On the other hand, a small increase could mean a lot more income and profit. If you notice a slump in the average value per order that might mean cross-selling or up-selling should be higher on your priority list.

Feel inspired, but don’t know where to start? Check out our sample app and look for the e-commerce demo dashboards. Do you just want to jump in head first? Start a free trial of Luzmo and create your first dashboard today!