In the world of eCommerce, one of the most important elements that you’ll always need to watch out for is conversion rate. To boil the idea down to its simplest concept, it describes the act of taking a simple user to your website and converting them into a customer.

At the end of the day, the way that they arrived at your site doesn’t matter. It could have been from a search engine, a paid advertisement or even word of mouth. If they don’t ultimately do what they came there to do – make a sale – you aren’t going to see the types of results that you deserve. As a result, there are a few key website benchmarking analytics that you should always be monitoring to help increase eCommerce conversions in any way possible.

3 Website Benchmarking Metrics to Monitor

Load Times

One of the most important benchmarks that you should be monitoring has to do with load times. Make no mistake: if you give a user any reason at all to leave your site, no matter how small, they will ultimately feel compelled to take it. When you look at the list of reasons why a person might leave an eCommerce destination, “a slow-loading page” is always at the top of the list. You need to make sure that you’re optimizing all of your pages for every type of device imaginable to improve conversion rates dramatically.

Uptime and Downtime

Another one of the major sticking points for many eCommerce users has to do with disruptions. If the sales funnel is disrupted in any way, you’ve essentially stopped a conversion dead in its tracks. One of the most unfortunately common (and easily avoidable) of these disruptions have to do with downtime. Many times crashes are caused not by failures of the hosting provider or other hardware, but by failures on the page where third parties were integrated with your own code. There are steps you can take to ensure that your pages are not subject to unnecessary downtime and reduce the risk of losing conversions.

Time to Interact

Simply put, “time to interact” is exactly what it sounds like – the total amount of time that it takes after an eCommerce page loads that users can begin to interact with it. If your page displays content quickly but the user can’t scroll, interact, or sees flickering or choppiness, it essentially accomplishes the same thing as a slowly loading page – it will frustrate visitors and may drive them right back to where they came from.  If your competitors can provide a smoother, faster UX, your conversion rates will plummet.

By monitoring a few key websites benchmarking analytics at all times, you can dramatically increase eCommerce conversions moving forward. You’ll begin to gain actionable insight into not only the behavior of your users but the decision-making process and how that relates to the online site that you’re trying to run. You’ll then be able to make necessary adjustments to help keep the reality of the situation in line with your expectations at all times.

Key Takeaways:

• One of the key performance metrics that you should always focus on is load time.
• Focusing on uptime and downtime will also provide you with actionable information that you can use to dramatically increase conversions.