How to Track the B2B Ecommerce Metrics That Matter

Within the B2B market, there are several metrics you can measure, analyze and compare. If you don't want to get drowned in the sea of numbers and graphs, you have to know where and what to look for. Understanding which metrics to prioritize can help you refine your approach and increase your likelihood of converting customers and driving growth.

With that in mind, here are a few metrics we recommend tracking in order to make informed business decisions.

B2B Ecommerce Metrics

1. B2B Lead-to-Close Conversion Rate (CVR).

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the process of improving the shopping experience to drive a specific KPI — usually, sales. This is the best rate to see how successful your marketing tactics are as it measures the percentage of website visitors that convert to buyers.

A healthy conversion rate means you have a highly engaged customer base, and it is a sign of growth and success. If it is low, look to user-journey mapping to see where you’re losing site visitors.

Because B2B sales cycles often take longer to close than B2C sales, calculating your conversion rates and assessing the performance of marketing campaigns is even more crucial. That’s why it is important to keep an eye on these numbers throughout the entire year rather than a month-to-month basis.

2. B2B Initial Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC).

Acquisition metrics are focused on how effective your website and other marketing efforts are at driving people to visit your site. More than just generic traffic volume, acquisition metrics can help you dig into who’s visiting and where they came from — so you can better contextualize traffic numbers.

The customer acquisition cost (CAC) measures how much your company spends to acquire a new customer by looking at your marketing spend and how it breaks down per customer. This helps determine your brand’s total ROI for marketing and advertising. Having an active awareness of your CAC can help prioritize campaigns within your budget.

For some B2B businesses, it's the only metric that shows how good (or bad) their performance and efficiency is. For others, it's a clear indicator something is not done right. But these numbers can help you detect where you need to make some changes (program, campaign, initiative, channel, approach) and as a result it clearly highlights the positive and negative effects of those changes.

Marketing percentage of customer acquisition cost

This one is a mouthful and is a bit technical. However, it’s a very telling metric that shows how well your marketing team’s performance and spending is.

Essentially, the marketing percentage of your CAC indicates how much money marketing spends within a time period and how many new customers it generates. It gives you insight into how well your marketing program is functioning and can be used to make better sales and marketing decisions.

Marketing originated customers

The marketing originated customers metric gives you the chance to have a clear insight into how much your customer percentage has been gained through marketing. You might have invested in tools and techniques and therefore, you should expect your audience to grow consequently.

Understanding this metric and it’s calculation helps identify how many individuals found out about your business and helps you know exactly what to do next and how to do it better. This metric plays a role in helping your company grow and acquire new business.

3. Churn rate for B2B ecommerce

The churn rate is a brutally honest metric that relates whether or not you have a viable business. Churn rate is a business metric that calculates the number of customers who leave a product over a given period of time, divided by total remaining customers.

This helps you determine the stage at which you are losing your customers and from there you can develop a strategy to improve the interaction with your product or service. Knowing the churn rate is important because it can be much easier and cheaper to have more returning customers than trying to attract new ones.

B2B Ecommerce Metrics Key Takeaway

If you are committed to improving your sales approach, you need to be tracking the right metrics. It is impossible to make an effective, informed decision without having the right metrics to guide you.

By tracking the above metrics, you can identify areas where you need to make changes and improve your overall sales approach. Depending on your business and your needs, there are several other metrics that can be measured, calculated, compared and changed to help improve your business.

For more information about B2B ecommerce, Imagination Media has prepared an information-brimming ebook for B2B merchants. You’ll learn more about metrics and the trends affecting them. To learn more about how you can transform your ecommerce experience for your customers, check out BigCommerce’s B2B solution, B2B Edition.