Any glitch in your website or discrepancy in its elements can have consequences that will not be beneficial for your brand and your bottom line. Improper website monitoring can be bad for eCommerce-focused companies because most of their profits are generated through the website. Therefore, having it monitored becomes mandatory.
This is why plenty of companies go out of their way just to keep a tab and monitor their websites, and for good reason.
Monitoring your website allows you to make informed decisions that will help it improve, along with many more benefits that your company might be missing out on.
What benefits does proper website monitoring provide? We’ve listed 7 reasons why eCommerce websites should be constantly monitored.
1. To determine your conversion rate
One of the best ways to measure your success when running an online business is by keeping track of your conversion rate.
Depending on each action you want visitors to take on a certain web page, the conversion rate is the total number of visitors that resulted in a purchase, an email subscription, or those who set an appointment. This number can be determined by dividing the total number of conversions by the total number of website visitors.
Take note that monitoring your conversions can also help you make improvements even outside your website. By looking at which paid advertising and traffic sources converting website visitors come from, you’ll be able to know which advertising efforts are bringing higher returns for your business.
For instance, if there are more paying customers from your email remarketing campaigns than from display advertisements, then you might want to focus more on your remarketing campaigns and see how you can improve it even more. Doing this will eventually help you improve the conversion rate of your website down the road.
2. To know the cost of acquiring a customer
One of the most useful benefits of digital marketing is you can see broad marketing overviews. It also allows you to focus on the little details at the same time. With proper website performance monitoring, you’ll be able to know how much it costs to acquire a customer.
In essence, a low Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is always better because this means you spend less money in pushing a user down your sales funnel to convert into a sale. However, the average cost of customer acquisition can vary among different industries.
Knowing the average CAC for your business allows you to make informed decisions regarding your advertising budget. If for instance, you want to get 50 new customers in a month and it costs around $30 to get a new customer in your niche, then you’ll know whether your $1,500 advertising budget per month will be sufficient.
3. To monitor and improve site speed performance
Because website speeds are revealed to affect user engagement, revenue, and other business factors, keeping your website performance in tip-top shape is very important.
However, building a fast website isn’t enough. Due to website degradation, monitoring your website speed from time to time is crucial in maintaining fast website speed.
Keeping your eCommerce website performance in good shape is even more crucial because it keeps your customers enticed to buy products from your online shop.
Online shoppers don’t want to wait for more than a minute just for it to load properly. If your website load speed becomes drastically long, it could discourage your customers from checking product details and in adding it to their cart. Worse, it may even make them think that your website isn’t trustworthy enough, which may drive them away to your competitors.
To maintain website performance, online businesses need to be constantly monitored and updated.
4. To improve site functionality
eCommerce websites are built to allow customers to buy items online. If for any reason, one component becomes faulty, it may seriously affect your sales and brand reputation. Constantly monitoring your eCommerce website will allow you to identify problematic areas right when it develops, which will give you a better chance of providing a solution faster.
On the other hand, keeping an eye out on industry trends as well as your competitors will allow you to constantly improve your website functionality. This will help you bring something new for your customers and provide them with a quality shopping experience every time they visit your website.
5. To maintain a good reputation
When running an eCommerce business, having a good reputation can be the single deciding factor between your business’ lackluster existence or booming success. However, getting a good reputation among your customers requires plenty of factors that work well together.
Fast website load speed, quality product descriptions, customer engagement (i.e., Amazon quiz), as well as order fulfillment and after-sales support, are just a number of factors that can help you build your reputation. Once you are confident enough about these factors, you can start advertising your business to get the word out to more people and hasten your reputation-building.
Moreover, having a good reputation requires constant work. You should constantly improve your offerings and your website’s functionality to maintain a good reputation among your customers. Additionally, Monitoring your website and staying on the lookout for reputational risks such as viral rant post about problematic customer experiences are crucial steps to maintain your business’ good reputation.
6. To reduce shopping cart abandonment
Basically, shopping cart abandonment indicates the number of people who added products on their card but didn’t proceed to the checkout process. When this number goes up, it might indicate that something is broken on your website, so having this under constant monitoring can help keep this number low.
7. For better inventory management
Good inventory management can be a big factor in profitability. Because it costs money to keep an inventory for your products, it’s better to just keep the “right” amount in stock.
Unfortunately, some businesses, especially small-to-medium eCommerce businesses, normally find it hard to know how much stock is “just right”.
By constantly monitoring your website, you can identify an increase or decrease in products that are being visited by customers. These changes in customer browsing patterns should help you know if a certain product needs to be restocked more often.
Conclusion
Monitoring your website has so many benefits that are intertwined with each other. At the end of the day, proper website monitoring will allow you to make informed decisions for your business and steer you towards success.
