I'm Jonathan Smalley. I'm the Founder and CEO at Yaguara.
On Optimal Metrics to Focus on First
We need to look at the metrics inside of the digital product in much the same way that we would think about a brick and mortar store. What is our traffic like? How many people are coming into our store? How many people are adding products to their cart? And then, how many people are actually checking out, with that cart?
Too often, companies - as they scale - look to start getting really granular and A/B testing and optimizing really early on. Believing that there's some type of kind of golden benchmark out there for industry. Initially, eCommerce was, 'Let's have a nice brand. Let's change where customers are purchasing from. And then they'll convert, probably at a lower price point because we're cutting out the middle man.' But, as we've seen eCommerce change the market's totally flooded and largely saturated at this point. And so, it's incredibly important that we keep these high-level metrics in the forefront.
First, establishing a baseline and then, understanding where there's opportunity for optimization before optimizing them.
On Mature eCommerce Metrics to Propel Your Team Forward
There's almost infinite metrics that we can optimize around. But ultimately, what we're looking to do is to try to draw a straight line in between our traffic and then our conversion rate, and ultimately what drives revenue. So when we look at metrics internally for digital product teams, we think about: traffic, sessions, our add-to-cart rate, our conversion rate, and then ultimately seeing there, where we drive revenue. Things like, creating recommendations in checkout in order to increase attachment rate and ultimately, increase our order value and our items per order.
