The concepts behind measuring the success of an eCommerce website don’t stray too far from those necessary to measure a website focused on lead generation. But what tools should you be using? And how can you make sure you’re measuring the correct things?

Here are 3 steps to make sure you are successfully measuring your eCommerce progress.

1. Measure your total number of customers in addition to revenue. It’s easy to say, “Oh! I made $X,000 this week, month or year.” But how many people led to those sales? Is it three repeat customers? A large network? You should consider your customer base as important as a B2B marketer’s lead database. How is it growing over time? Were there specific events that led to an influx in new customers? What caused it?

2. Evaluate where your customers are coming from. Now that you are tracking people coming through the proverbial door as opposed to cash-flow only, you should measure where your best customers are coming from. Is it via Twitter? A specific referral source? A co-marketing venture?

Those eCommerce companies using HubSpot can track this by integrating their lead tracking with a third-party shopping cart like Paypal. Parallel created a tool to sync Paypal and HubSpot, using HubSpot’s lead API to ‘close the loop’. Now you can see where specific customers are coming from and their path through your website, helping you understand what’s working and what’s not! So where are your best customers coming from?

3. Evaluate the number of people who start the checkout process but don’t complete a sale. Oh no! So close! Do you notice that a lot of people add things to their shopping cart but decide not to commit? What should you do with these people? Well, how about nurture them?

By following up with customers who have not completed their purchase, you can encourage the close. Perhaps you can set up automatic emails to those individuals. Maybe you could set up a lead nurturing campaign. You already know specifically what they’re interested in, so use that knowledge to lasso them back in and get the digits.
Read more: http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/14981/How-to-Measure-the-Success-of-Your-eCommerce-Website.aspx#ixzz1OERmsXRw