Key performance indicators for single-purchase products

Repeat Customer Insights focuses on repeat customer metrics but one customer was asking about what to look for with new customers:

This may seem like a strange question but do you have any suggestions for an app/methodology/dashboard to capture New Customer Insights?

Traffic and conversion metrics are going to be very important to you, at least more valuable than retention and loyalty metrics are.

You might be able to do something with "refer a friend" type of stuff but I think that's going to be only a minor impact overall.

As a business, JSON-LD for SEO is similar. Since it's a one-time purchase, retention and loyalty metrics don't matter that much. Some people might buy a second license for another store or refer the app to others, but the majority don't.

The main KPIs I track are all around how effective my primary funnel is:

1. Traffic
2. Installs (add to carts would be your parallel)
3. Purchases
4. Revenue

Then I calculate the different conversion rates:

1. Install CR ( #2 / #1 )
2. Cart completion CR ( #3 / #2 )
3. Overall CR ( #3 / #1 )

This tells be both on an absolute level how things are going (raw KPIs) and on an relative level (conversion rates).

You can look at them on a daily and weekly basis though you'll get more noise in the data. I like monthly and month-to-date levels of detail myself.

The Key KPI for you will be to figure out which part of your funnel is the weakest and work on that until it's better. While working on it you might adopt some other "Sub" KPIs but only as ways to track your improvements. Once that Key KPI is better, you'd drop those other sub-KPIs.

For example, if traffic is the weakest part (as it is for 90% of stores), you might have these KPIs

• Key KPI: total traffic
• Sub KPI: traffic from SEO (assuming you're actively improving SEO)
• Sub KPI: traffic from Facebook ads (ditto)
• Sub KPI: traffic to your product pages

The idea is that the Sub KPIs give you faster feedback you can measure towards improving the Key KPI.

Then once traffic is better, you'd junk those Sub KPIs and focus on something else (e.g. cart abandonment).

And of course, revenue/profit is the main KPI. Though it's hard to influence directly which is why there are eleventy-bazillion KPIs to pick from.

Eric Davis