Sales Growth & Analytics

A client once showed me a dashboard with forty-one metrics on it and asked why sales were flat. The dashboard was the answer. Nobody can act on forty-one numbers.

On an e-commerce project I watch four: revenue per session, add-to-cart rate, checkout completion, and returning-customer share. Between them they cover whether people want the thing, whether the page persuades them, whether the checkout gets in the way, and whether the product was any good once it arrived.

Everything else is diagnostic. Bounce rate does not tell you what to change; it tells you where to look. Time on page is actively misleading on a well-designed product page, where finding the answer quickly is the point.

The most useful half-hour in any engagement is watching five real people use the site with the analytics closed. Twice now that has surfaced a broken variant selector that no funnel report had flagged, because the visitors who hit it simply left without an event firing.

Instrument the decisions you are willing to act on this quarter. Everything else is a screenshot for a slide deck.