The Ecommerce Numbers Worth Tracking (and the Ones That Waste Your Time)
Most store dashboards show plenty of numbers and few decisions. Six metrics that change what you do next — and four that mostly make you feel busy.
Most store owners have access to hundreds of metrics and act on roughly none of them. The problem isn't discipline — it's that most dashboards are built to display data rather than to prompt decisions.
A simple test
Before adding a number to your dashboard, finish this sentence: "If this goes down by 20%, I will …"
If you can't finish it, the metric is decoration. Track it if you enjoy it, but don't hold meetings about it.
Six numbers worth tracking
1. Funnel conversion, step by step. Not "2.1% conversion" but sessions → product view → add to cart → checkout started → purchase. One overall number tells you something is wrong; five tell you where. A store losing people between cart and checkout has a different problem to one losing them at product view, and the fixes have nothing in common.
2. Recovered revenue. Actual money from customers who abandoned and came back, measured against real orders. Not emails sent, not open rate. This is the only number that says whether your recovery setup is worth its cost.
3. Zero-result searches. Every internal search returning nothing is a customer telling you what they expected to find, in their own words. It's free demand research and the list is usually short enough to act on in an afternoon. Half the entries are typically vocabulary or spelling failures rather than missing stock.
4. Repeat purchase rate. The share of customers buying more than once, over a fixed window. It's the cheapest growth available, and it moves when your post-purchase experience improves — which most stores never touch.
5. Mobile conversion versus desktop. Track them separately. A large gap is almost always a checkout or speed problem, not a customer preference. Most stores discover their mobile conversion is roughly half of desktop and have never once looked at why.
6. Time to first byte on your checkout. An operational number with direct commercial impact. Checkout can't be page-cached, so it's the page most exposed to server slowness, at the exact moment the customer is holding a card.
Four that mostly waste your time
| Metric | Why it disappoints | Track instead |
|---|---|---|
| Total sessions | Goes up when you spend more. Says nothing about quality. | Sessions that reach product view |
| Bounce rate | Definition varies by setup; a satisfied visitor who found an answer counts as a bounce. | Funnel step conversion |
| Email open rate | Increasingly unreliable thanks to privacy features that pre-load images. | Revenue per email sent |
| Average page load, site-wide | Averages hide the pages that matter. | LCP on your top three templates |
Getting the tracking right first
All of this assumes your numbers are true, which is a bigger assumption than it should be. Before optimising anything:
- Verify events fire once. Duplicate purchase events are common and quietly inflate everything downstream.
- Check attribution isn't double-counting. If your ad platform and analytics both claim the same order, one is wrong and you're probably budgeting against it.
- Confirm refunds are subtracted. Revenue that includes returns is a number you'll eventually have to un-believe.
- Test on mobile, in a private window. Consent banners and blockers change what actually gets recorded.
An hour verifying tracking is worth more than a month optimising against numbers that were never right.
Our Cart & Funnel Infrastructure service includes verifying your tracking properly — events, attribution and recovered revenue measured against real orders. From $850.
Related articles
Why Carts Are Abandoned — and Which Ones Are Worth Chasing
Around seven in ten carts never become orders. Some of those were never going to. Here's how to tell the difference and spend your effort accordingly.
Cart Recovery Without Handing Your Funnel to an Email Platform
Most recovery setups end up rebuilt inside a third-party marketing tool. That's a decision with consequences — here's what they are, and the alternative.