Ever wondered how to tell if your marketing is actually working?

I actually get asked about this on a regular basis. Not knowing what’s working and what’s not in your business is a common problem.

So I’d like to let you in on a little secret…. 

Did you know – there is one thing that all successful eCommerce store owners do in their business? 

It’s not the only thing that they do of course.

But it IS something that helps to drive that growth and success! 

Unfortunately a lot of small business owners don’t realise it’s something that they should be doing in their business. 

So… Do you wanna know what it is?

Find out the ONE thing all successful eCommerce store owners do…

The one thing all successful eCommerce store owners do

How do you know if you’ve improved?

Years ago, when my husband was a kid, he was a talented, competitive swimmer. 

He was so good that he eventually made Olympic try-outs. (He never quite got past Ian Thorpe or Michael Klim, but he was pretty quick.) 

As a kid he did a lot of hours in the pool. As an 11, 12 year old boy, he would’ve been doing 10 sessions a week of swimming. 

And he’s kept some of the journals from those days. They recorded all the sessions for each child, how many kilometres they swam, what strokes they did, what they needed to improve on and so on.

And there was one comment in this particular journal as an 11, 12 year old boy that said, “Marcus had an off week this week. He only swam 24 kilometres.” 

(Compared to me – I’d probably sink if I tried to swim more than 24 metres!)

Measure your progress

Just as an athlete records their progress to see if they’ve improved – so does the successful business owner. 

ALL the most successful business owners I know do this in their business every week. 

Each week we review and record some specific performance metrics (numbers) so that you can judge your progress over time.

The idea is to record these “Ecommerce success metrics” at regular intervals – daily, weekly or monthly. 

Doing this will tell you:

  • How you’re improving over time,
  • What actions you took to create those results,
  • What you need to work on to improve further.

You can’t change what you don’t acknowledge… 

Wise words Dr Phil!

The point is – if we have no idea of our performance on a regular basis, we have no idea whether we are heading in the right direction with our business, right? 

So we need to give ourselves the information that we need in order to decide whether we are making good progress, or are we swimming backwards, or are we swimming sideways? 

Or do we need to change tact? Are the things that we’re doing working for us? Are they successful? Should we do more of them? 

And so on and so forth.

What Ecommerce success metrics should you record?

Firstly, you need to make sure you’ve set up Google Analytics, integrated that with your website and make sure you’re tracking the Ecommerce conversions. 

Google Analytics will not only track things like visitors to your website and conversion rate.

It’ll also track other things as well, like number of purchase conversions, abandoned cart rate and average order value. 

Even better – it can also do these statistics per traffic source. 

So you can get really specific information about which source of traffic is actually converting the best for you. 

Very, very handy if you want to know which of your marketing efforts are working and which aren’t.

The Ecommerce success metrics that I suggest all of you online store owners track are:

  • Conversion rate,
  • Bounce rate,
  • Weekly sales from your different traffic sources, 
  • Shopping cart abandonment rate, 
  • Average order value.

Tracking is just the first step…

The next step is to use that information, and the trends that you can start to see over time, to inform your marketing. 

How do you use this information? 

Firstly, you want to look for areas of your business that need work. 

Is your conversion rate below average? Is your bounce rate really high? Are you not getting many unique visitors to your website each week?

Then, you can start to work out which areas of your marketing are having the best, most positive impact. Or vice versa. 

Perhaps you work with an Influencer and your Instagram page is going nuts so you’re expecting sales to go nuts.

But instead it’s absolute crickets on your website and no-one buys. So then, you look at your metrics and see that people weren’t clicking over to your website. No wonder they weren’t buying!

So rather than not doing another campaign, you might decide to run a different campaign that includes more obvious incentives to click over to your store and buy. 

What do you do?

So leave a comment for me. Let me know what you think.

Are you tracking your Ecommerce success metrics? What has been worthwhile for you if you are doing it? And if you’re not doing it, let me know if you will start.

And if you are not doing this – I know it’s about as interesting as poking your eye with a stick, but please take my word for it.

It is an absolutely invaluable task that you can do. It doesn’t take very long to do each week, and it will definitely set you up for success in the future!