Top 6 E-commerce Metrics for B2B Enterprises

Every Sales, Marketing, Advertising professional is known to constantly worry about numbers, mainly analytics.This is not news. Take the example of Tv ads. Which advertiser wouldn’t worry about tv ratings when running advertising campaigns?

Some of the most successful ecommerce and retail businesses have been known to be huge fans of metrics. And rightfully so. Today, this growing fan base is making virtually every marketing and business decision data-driven.

When it comes to e-commerce, there are several similarities between B2B and B2Cs. Some of these key overlaps include elements like AI-powered product search, high-resolution product images, simple navigation…

But when it comes to e-commerce metrics, these numbers help produce value-added insights and drive sustained growth to achieve a particular end goal.

In a martech world where analytics and metrics play a huge role, what are some of the key metrics that can power your ecommerce business? We give you some:

1. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
Budgeting is a part and parcel of every B2B enterprise’s activity, so it should only be natural to also compute the CAC. This is the division of costs spent on acquiring more customers (marketing or associated expenses) by the number of customers acquired in a particular period.

2. Conversions
A deep breakdown of conversion rates is basic to any business activity. But when it comes to measuring conversions effectively, it is essential to decipher both marketing qualified leads (MQLs) and sales qualified leads (SQLs) because they help provide relevant information on the quality of all your inbound inquiries and the overall efficiency of your lead nurturing process too.

3. Comprehensive site metrics

When it comes to assessing your overall site performance, some key questions include:

– what your online consumers are looking at most
– what actions they are taking
– when they visit your website?
– the source of your web traffic

Remember, these metrics are not the same as conversions.

Site metrics related to -numbers of unique monthly visitors, -the duration of time visitors spend on your site (and on which part of it), -the engagement rate: how many visitors register, buy or download something from the portal are especially vital for e-commerce.

Over and above this, comparing the information here to the one of point (2) is also important because some websites attract a lot of traffic. But these two metrics serve as signals to tell a brand when their content is not relevant enough to visitors, because they convert very few leads.

4. Customer retention rate
Comparing the difference in individual customer orders placed online during a particular period could indicate whether or not your web store effectively fulfils your customer’s needs. If customers seem to be shifting back to offline ordering after initial use of your B2B e-commerce platform, this could mean that your e-store needs some improvement.

5. Returning customers
In most sales and marketing processes, the number of returning customers is just as crucial as number of new visitors. This B2B KPI can indicate how well your e-commerce portal is meeting current demands and changing consumer trends in terms of personalized messaging, feeds and offerings range, besides just placing orders.

6. Cart Abandonment Rate
Based on statistics once compiled by Baymard Institute, the average shopping cart abandonment rate for eCommerce sites is 69.23%. That is just not cool! In most cases, this could be attributed to high shipping costs, a much too complicated checkout process, website errors during payment…and the like. Agreed that some visitors will just not be ready to buy and are simply just browsing around….you can’t get rid of the window shoppers now can you…but having a comprehensive understanding of your cart abandonment will be a step closer to converting customers before they leave your site. Because, adding to the cart typically indicates an intent to purchase and its not wise to lose out on that.

Pro tip: Enable Google Analytics on your e-commerce site to begin with

Depending on your overall business or e-commerce platform’s end goals, there are a myriad of metrics and KPIs worth measuring and analyzing. The ones above are just a few of them. What is most important is to make sure that you pick the numbers and indicators that mirror your site’s end objectives.

Jonathan Carlson, Director of Marketing, ViralGains says, “The primary metrics B2B e-commerce marketers should be measuring include: cost to acquire a customer, cost to retain a customer, customer retention rate, and customer lifetime value. Then optimize those metrics to make sure you’re getting the most value at the lowest cost. The nice thing about e-commerce vs. offline sales is that you have more data to track and tests you can run at the point of conversion. For instance, what’s your cart abandonment rate? Can you improve the conversion rate of your sales pages? Which of your advertising channels most efficiently lead to an online sale? How can you use smarter targeting and contextual messaging to directly influence those sales? This injection of what have traditionally been considered B2C insights into the B2B world can be a huge help to marketers looking to drive down costs and shorten the sales cycle through diligent testing and analysis. Of course, B2B sales are generally going to require more touchpoints, nurturing, and education than say, buying a pair of socks from Amazon—but any opportunity to better control the conversion process is one that marketers should be excited about.”

Keeping a close track of e-commerce-specific B2B metrics not only allows you to calculate the return on your investment, it also helps you recognize rising trends and change in behavior. These markers can help you capitalize on your existing process to get more customers to order from you, with increased frequency.