Measurable Results from Your Website
Every store uses a set of reports that they rely on to run that business. Some reports are designed for understanding turnover and are used to make decisions about specific products to reorder. Other reports track big picture trends that provide insight on the general health of the business.

There are key big picture trends that you almost certainly track in your store. You track sales, and you probably compare sales against the same period in previous years. You may also track changes in the number of customer transactions, the size of the average purchase, and the average price point of an item purchased. Do you sell wine to more customers, but find they are spending less money and purchasing lower priced products? If so, you might use this insight to make changes to displays and the products you order to encourage customers to raise the value of their average purchase.

It is important to tracks trends on your website too. The main objective of launching your website was probably to increase sales. Sales on a website can come with a wealth information about their source, whether from an e-mail campaign or referring website. The following is a list of indicators that will highlight trends in your web business. As you pick indicators that help you run your website, try to identify trends that clarify actions you can take to improve your business.

Traffic Indicators

The most obvious of online indicators is the number of unique visitors to your website, and the number of pages they visit. If you have the ability to track the number of repeat visitors and heavy users this will give you a good sense of the loyalty of your customers online.

Revenue Indicators

How much business are you doing each day? This is obviously a critical indicator and may be out of synch with your traffic. Do you know why, and is this a regular pattern?

By combining revenue and traffic indicators you can create powerful indicators like the conversion rate on your site. Of the total visitors to your site, how many make a purchase or subscribe to your newsletter? Another powerful indicator is the average sale per visitor. This combines with your conversion rate to create the average value of a visitor, which is particularly useful when evaluating advertising campaigns.

Are more new customers buying wine on your site? How successful are you at creating repeat customers? How does the average order size for new customers compare with repeat customers? An insight here might tell how effective you are at generating repeat business.

Pay-per-Click advertising

If you are purchase traffic from shopping comparison sites you will want to track the advertising cost per order and the margin of your order paid to advertising. You should break this down by product, and compare them across different sites in your program. If some listings are generating higher than average sales or more profitable sales perhaps you should increase your budget for these leads. Do some products consistently attract referrals that rarely convert? Unusually high interest in Roederer Estate Brut probably comes from hopeful shoppers in search of bargain Cristal. Removing this item from your shopping feeds will increase the conversion rate for these campaigns.

Search Engine Indicators

Review referrals from both free and paid listings on the search engines to identify keywords that give the highest conversion rates. Compare general sales figures with keyword campaigns to find additional lift from sales that doesn’t follow a linear path. What does it cost to find a new customer?

Browsing the above lists of indicators may suggest the need for a more deliberate approach to selling your wine online. Certainly these indicators are most powerful when they relate to and inform a strategy that includes marketing and service improvements.