What is an Ecommerce Dashboard?

In a world where companies use numerous different tools to track business performance, data dashboards have become essential for conveying the most important numbers to teams within your company and your clients quickly and with ease.

An ecommerce dashboard has just that purpose. It provides your ecommerce team with a clear overview of key financial and website KPIs at any time. In addition, it enables tracking and analysis of essential elements for your ecommerce businesses on a day-to-day basis. 

Keeping a close eye on your ecommerce dashboard allows you to monitor the performance of your online store in real-time and, more importantly, ensure that all your customer journey is well-documented along with shopping experience events. 

Which KPIs and Metrics Should My Ecommerce Dashboard Include, and Where Is the Data Coming From?

Modern e-commerce businesses know the value of tracking key performance indicators, as they help you make the best decisions possible for your business and adjust your sales and marketing efforts in real-time to ensure your pre-set goals are met. 

1. Which KPIs and Metrics Should You Include?

There is no universal answer. What you include in your ecommerce dashboard depends on your business goals and what you want to accomplish with the data.

Now, keep in mind that when properly optimizing the performance of your ecommerce store, you need access to useful and actionable data, preferably in real-time. However, when you have a large number of metrics at your disposal, choosing where to begin can be tricky.

Now, if you are new to this, opting for a pre-built ecommerce dashboard template might not be a bad idea. Just to get you started. In most cases, these contain the following metrics -

• Average Order Value - an average value of transactions within a specified date range.
• Ecommerce Conversion Rate - the percentage of sessions that resulted in an ecommerce transaction within a specified date range.
• Revenue - revenue from web ecommerce or in-app transactions within a specified date range.
• Revenue by channel - similar to the previous metric, just split up by channels.
• Transactions - the number of completed purchases on your site within a specified date range.
• Users - visitors who have initiated at least one session within a specified date range.

Now, these are just some of the options you might be interested in when deciding what to feature in your ecommerce dashboard. However, it is important to point out that the KPIs and metrics you choose to track also depend on where you get your data from.

2. Possible Data Sources for Your Ecommerce Dashboard

Data that populates your ecommerce dashboard has to come from somewhere. It can be a single source or multiple sources, depending on what tool you use to collect it and display it. 

As you probably know, you can use a whole selection of tools to collect and display your data from Google Analytics to Shopify, WooCommerce, or HubSpot. You can use a single one or have data for multiple sources pulled into a single ecommerce dashboard so that you can have a far more insightful report on the growth and success of your online store.

What are the Some of the Most Important Insights I Can Get from an Ecommerce Dashboard?

One of the most important benefits that tracking ecommerce metrics and KPIs provides to brands is gaining a deeper understanding of how visitors are using their ecommerce websites. 

Once you have chosen the data source and the ecommerce metrics and KPIs that you want to track, it is time to analyze them and get insights that will help drive ecommerce success and help you create smart marketing strategies.

Let’s take a look at this a bit closer.

1. Detect Major Issues and Fix Them Quickly

Here are just some of the things that your ecommerce dashboards can alert you to:

• Website downtime
• Build-ups of support queries
• Low stock
• Order fulfillment issues

If you are checking your dashboards daily, you can react to these alerts, see where the problem originates, and fix it in real-time. Thus, ensuring customer satisfaction rate stays high.

2. Understand Customer Behavior Better and Adjust Your Efforts Accordingly

The ultimate goal of any ecommerce store is to sell as many products as possible. To sell more products efficiently, it is important to understand how people who visit your online store behave and make adjustments accordingly, so they end up staying longer and coming back for more. 

So, for example, optimizing the number of conversions per number of visits is one way to ensure that your ecommerce site is performing well. And one way to identify how your online store currently performs in that regard is to track the path leading immediately up to a conversion.

Why is tracking that path so important? To be honest, customers that are about to convert are typically impatient, and when they are willing to make a purchase, they want the process to be smooth and fast. By tracking the steps that lead directly to conversions, you can iron out any issues that would prevent the desired outcome. 

In that case, make sure you are tracking at the least the following:

• Funnel
• Checkout process
• Variable testing
• Form testing

Ensure the Success and Growth of Your Online Store

Think about it. Currently, there are an estimated 12 million – 24 million ecommerce sites across the entire globe, and more online stores are created daily. 

Sure, less than 1M of these sites sell more than $1,000/year, but it is still a competitive market, and you will need all the help you can get to ensure the success and growth of your online store. 

And that’s where ecommerce dashboards come in.

A carefully constructed ecommerce dashboard can provide you with insights into how your store is doing in real-time and what areas require adjustment or a complete overhaul, ultimately helping you reach the sales goals you are aiming for.