key metrics

If you aren’t on top of the most important metrics, you won’t know how well your dropshipping business is performing. In turn, you’ll be unable to pinpoint areas which need improvement, or tell if changes you make have had a positive impact.

So what are these must-monitor metrics, and how can you go about tracking them without taking up all of your time?

Site traffic

If you’ve invested in SEO to drive more people to your site, you want to know that this is having the desired effect.

Looking at site traffic is a quick and easy way to see how visitor trends change over time, and also to tell which sources are generating the most traction.

You could find that your social media efforts are working a treat, but that your search optimization leaves something to be desired. You’ll never know unless you look.

Conversions

Getting people to click through to your site is worth celebrating in its own right, but if they don’t buy anything, that’s bad news.

Monitoring conversion rates is crucial as a result, because you want to know if people are arriving on your site in large numbers but then not taking the next step.

It could lead you to change the way you design landing pages, and also influence other strategies to ensure that the right people are finding your site in the first place.

Tip: spending too much time on your dropshipping business? See what you can automate

Dropshipping benefits from automation more so than lots of other niches because it’s typically handled as a small-scale operation without the resources of fully fledged ecommerce organizations.

With the help of dropshipping automation software from vendors like Spark Shipping, it’s easy to automate things like tracking key metrics and analyzing performance data without eating into your busy schedule.

Sales

It might seem obvious, but if you aren’t taking note of your sales figures, then you’re missing the most critical metric that points to the relative success and sustainability of your dropshipping business.

Looking at sales over different periods is useful, as it gives you an idea of how far you’ve come, whether there have been any speed bumps on the way, and if there are any identifiable factors at play which are swaying how many customers you win over at any given point in the calendar.

Cart abandonment

This is closely associated with conversion rates, and is an example of how there are a lot of hurdles standing between prospective customers and the actual act of completing a purchase.

If people add items to the cart, but don’t go ahead and buy the products, you’re doing something right, but there’s also a problem within this process that needs to be ironed out.

It could be that the checkout interface is too confusing or takes too long. It could be that there are fees for things like shipping that only appear when items are added to the cart. It could be any number of other foibles that are underpinned by a high cart abandonment rate. Your job is to look into this and find a fix.

Order value

Finally, being on the ball about the average value of each order placed on your site will tell you a lot about your target audience, and about the significance that individual buyers bring to the overall trajectory of your dropshipping business.

Increasing the average amount spent in a single transaction will not boost sales figures, but will make you more money, and is generally cheaper than customer acquisition itself, so is worth monitoring and enhancing.