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Ecommerce Metrics Ebook
Ecommerce Metrics Ebook
Ecommerce Metrics Ebook
as an e-commerce CTO
DANNY MILES CTO, Dollar Shave Club
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Danny Miles joined Dollar Shave Club as the company’s first Chief
Technology Officer in 2017. Previously, Danny served as the Vice President
of Direct-To-Consumer Technology at Nike, and has more than twenty years
experience in architecting, implementing and launching leading-edge tech-
nical solutions.
This morning ritual usually takes me about 10 sponsibilities, but it’s a foundational area that the
minutes. I do this not to find problems but to whole business depends on. The graphic below
get situational awareness to start my day. Site illustrates why site reliability and performance is
reliability and performance is just one of my re- so important.
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HOW TO PRIORITIZE METRIC S AS AN E- COMMERCE C TO
If the site isn’t doing well, users won’t be moving in the order shown in the graphic. Therefore, I
through the on-site sales funnel and converting check my metrics in this order during my morning
(impacting the metrics in ring 2). Then, big driv- routine. Sometimes I’ll see anomalies and trends
ers of traffic to our site like Google and Facebook that might not get picked up by alerts. If I do see
will see that we aren’t converting, because we something that doesn’t look right or something I
report that information back to them (impacting don’t understand, I’ll ping a member of the team.
the metrics in ring 3). In addition, any ad spend But, generally, first thing in the morning is not the
will have been wasted. Then, traffic will dry up time to be discovering performance issues: this is
and business metrics (ring 4) will take a big hit. a level-setting exercise to begin my day.
That’s why site reliability and performance is such
In the sections below, I dive into each of my met-
a critical area to the business: any issues get sig-
ric areas and describe the specific metrics I look
nificantly amplified beyond just the loss of a sale/
at in each ring during my morning routine.
conversion.
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HOW TO PRIORITIZE METRIC S AS AN E- COMMERCE C TO
01 APPLICATION-LEVEL METRICS
I want to see some key application-level metrics. It’s important to go through the basics of the e-com-
merce application and make sure it’s serving users (and users are behaving on it) as expected.
Active sessions We care a lot about this metric. This is the stateful
part of the site where people are actually logged
in and creating carts. If active sessions drops off
you know something is wrong.
Orders processed This tells me we’re able to make money and also
tells me at what rate we’re making money.
I consider security to be a part of site reliability and performance engineering. While the following metrics
provide indications of site functionality, I also use them to assess security issues.
Logins per day Both failed and successful. This number should be
fairly predictable. Unexpected changes may indi-
cate a security threat or breach.
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HOW TO PRIORITIZE METRIC S AS AN E- COMMERCE C TO
While these metrics are important to the business they’re also important to the tech team because they
can signal technical issues. Next, I’ll go a level deeper into system-level metrics.
02 SYSTEM-LEVEL METRICS
Uptime
We have a “Sunglasses Man” who pops up every but you are promoting poor quality of your brand
once in a while telling customers the site’s not while your digital presence is down.
available. Our goal is to never see Sunglasses
The impact of downtime through the big ad plat-
Man. We should be getting alerts about problems
forms that drive traffic to our site, like Facebook
way before Sunglasses Man needs to show up.
and Google, lasts beyond just the time you are
My view on site downtime is a bit different than offline. We report back in real time to Facebook,
what I typically hear, but I think it reflects the and their algorithms get tuned based on whether
reality of our digital business. For me, downtime people are landing on our site and completing our
isn’t as much about losing new orders and con- checkout. If we have an outage on our site or if we
versions, although it does certainly affect those stop reporting back to our ad partners, their al-
metrics. In my experience, the biggest impact of gorithms may stop serving impressions and it will
downtime on an e-commerce site is the lost mar- take days to re-tune and scale the traffic back up.
keting dollars and wasted effort driving traffic to Outside of our programmatic buying platforms,
the site. Marketing campaigns drive our business. the lead times for TV and radio spots are not
The worst thing that can happen is an outage something you can halt during an outage so you
during a big campaign we’re running around are literally throwing money away at that point.
March Madness or, when I was at Nike, during the So, downtime has a lot of ripple effects. It’s not
Olympics. If our site isn’t available or performant just losing new customers and orders—it’s all the
100 percent during those times the impact can investment you’re putting into marketing, search,
ripple through partners, search engines, and ad media, and social.
servers. Not only have you wasted your ad spend
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HOW TO PRIORITIZE METRIC S AS AN E- COMMERCE C TO
Unique users on the site How many unique users are on the site and does
it match up with expectations? I have week-over-
week and year-over-year comparisons for this
metric, as well as a predicted range.
Requests served from edge I look a lot at traffic served at the edge, via our
versus origin (cache hits CDN, versus our core infrastructure. I
versus cache misses) want to make sure requests are hitting the
cache. If too many requests are coming
all the way to your origin web server for
images and other content, then something may
not be right and your end users could be experi-
ence slow performance. A lot of activity should be
caught at the edge via CDN, which helps if you’re
experiencing a DDoS attack.
Latency
The site needs to be fast, otherwise users will become frustrated and leave the site before they
complete their purchases. I primarily focus on two performance metrics:
Response times For any API or any endpoint, I want to know what
are the response times. Response times can di-
rectly correlate to your conversion rates. In my ex-
perience, when response times start to deteriorate,
they don't usually improve without intervention.
Before you get to a point where your website’s
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HOW TO PRIORITIZE METRIC S AS AN E- COMMERCE C TO
Page load time I focus a lot on the time it takes for pages to
actually be useful to the user, which is the time it
takes to load and render a piece of content and
for the page to be interactive. Page load time is a
measure of speed from the user’s vantage point,
and this information is captured by monitoring
the client side. The time it takes to transact or
get through an API is more likely to degrade after
we’ve pushed changes into production. This
would in turn have business impact. I recommend
having an “always on” offense when it comes to
speed as the continous deployment of new code,
content, pixels, and tracking can quickly shift
your site from a 2-3 second load time to a 7-8
second load time where you’ll see your conversion
rate go off a cliff.
I like to further break down page load time by device and by browser to ensure that users are having
similar experiences. I’ve definitely experienced situations where certain device types and browsers have
prolonged load times and we’ve had to engineer device-specific fixes, especially now that most brands'
traffic is coming from mobile devices that are less performant than desktops and tablets.
Errors
Errors will always occur on the site, but I really Then I check error message patterns to
need to be aware of any systemic flaws that are see any underlying issues.
blocking users from viewing content, using fea-
I just described the site reliability metrics I pay
tures, and making purchases. Are we getting mal-
the most attention to as CTO. Next, I describe
formed requests or behaviors in the request that
some of the “outer ring” metrics I pay the most
don’t make sense? I check 8-10 error rates which
attention to.
capture key user requests and Tier 1 services.
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Number of pages visited This is the number of pages visited per session.
Product/content views This tracks what users are looking at and how often.
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HOW TO PRIORITIZE METRIC S AS AN E- COMMERCE C TO
Time to conversion This is the amount of time it took for the user to
make a purchase after landing on the site.
Abandonment rate This is the percentage of site visitors who left the
site without making a purchase. Also important to
ask is: Are people abandoning the site in particular
places? This will help us reduce leakage and keep
users moving towards a purchase.
A/B Testing Groups We are typically running multiple feature and con-
tent experiments across the site. Comparing the
metrics above by testing group is key.
All of these metrics are a level up from the purely time the company comes up with a new theme or
technical because they involve UX, content, and campaign there’s work to do. Also, new features
design. We’re constantly adding new site instru- that my team is responsible for developing con-
mentation to capture user behavior data. Every stantly impact these metrics.
As I explained above, it’s critical to ensure our are operational. Any number of things can disrupt
data pipelines back to referrers like Google, reporting back to ad platforms. The two most
Facebook, and other large drivers of site traffic common issues are:
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HOW TO PRIORITIZE METRIC S AS AN E- COMMERCE C TO
The way to find problems with reporting back to ately want to stop spending money on ads until
referrers is to set up robust alerts in your web the problem is resolved. As a last resort, Google
analytics platform. For example, if I’m serving ad and Facebook will stop serving ads and driving
impressions, but not converting at normal or ex- traffic to the site, but I’d prefer to know well be-
pected rates, there’s likely something wrong with fore that happens.
the site or the instrumentation. I would immedi-
Orders sent to warehouse I pay close attention to the number of orders I ex-
(expected and actual) pect to send to the warehouse, and the number ac-
tually received by the warehouse. If we miss a day,
that’s bad because people are waiting idle at the
warehouse one day and have a huge backlog the
next day (sometimes requiring extra resources to
get everything shipped out).
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Because we are a subscription business, there are Similarly, holidays also add complexity to our
some unique things I pay attention to. The worst operations. Any issues with order or payment pro-
day of the year for us is February 28 because cessing have ripple effects for fulfillment, opera-
we need to process payments and orders for all tions, and customer service.
subscriptions for the 28th, 29th, 30th, and 31st.
Average order value The average dollar value for orders in a given time
(AOV) period. Numerous technology issues can affect
AOV, from site availability to site speed to errors
to payment processing.
Order rate/Ship rate AOV tell us that we’re making money. Orders per
(orders per hour/day) hour/day tells us if we’re making money at the
rate we should be. Again, numerous technology
problems can slow down our order rate.
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HOW TO PRIORITIZE METRIC S AS AN E- COMMERCE C TO
Technology problems create friction that will drive these business metrics in the wrong direction. This is
why I’m obsessive about my platform reliability and performance metrics.
Conclusion
CTOs from e-commerce and retail firms swim conversion rate). That’s why I wrote this article:
in a sea of business and system health data. to offer what I think is an efficient framework for
These leaders are ultimately responsible for very thinking about and prioritizing metrics, so that
granular technical performance metrics (like e-commerce CTOs can check what matters in 10
disk space), but they also play a vital role sup- minutes, and then go about their days.
porting key business performance metrics (like
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