bySteve Conway

Selecting the right metrics and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) in the customer journey funnel is really important for the success of any business, especially if you are selling your brand’s offerings through an online store. This is because it is only if you can find the right KPIs and track them using an easy to use CRM tool, you can measure how well your funnel is working, and thereafter rethink about how you can make necessary adjustments to optimize your conversions.

Hence as one of the most popular vendors of Salesforce Alternative CRM software solutions in the marketplace, we have put together the most important KPIs that any online shop must measure and check that can allow their businesses to structure what can feel like an eternity of measurable indicators that can optimize business growth. 
However, before we deep dive into these critical metrics which we wish to illustrate let us find out what a customer journey funnel is so that you can understand where do you need to measure or rather what is important and unimportant for creating more engagements which can lead to the growth of your revenue.

What is a Customer Journey Funnel?
As you might have already guessed, the funnel in a modern marketing strategy does no more comprise of only four steps (e.g. awareness, interest, decision, and purchase) nor does it suddenly stop at purchase. 
This is because the modern funnel is designed to accommodate many of the complexities for providing end-to-end customer experience, right from prospecting to the buyers, to sell, and beyond.
Hence customer journey funnel provides a way for the marketers to create an immersive experience for their prospects and customers across multiple devices, channels, and more in order to interact and engage with their potential buyers, and at the end turn them into brand advocates who can bring in more buyers directly for their company. 

How can you determine the health of your funnel?
Now that you know how important is it to build your brand’s own customer journey funnel, it is equally critical how you can gauge the effectiveness of what you have in place, whereby a big part of this lies in analyzing your own metrics by gathering enough data, which can provide a good idea of your organization’s strengths and weaknesses. 
Now a customer journey through your online store can be short or long with objectives that are defined as “conversion” and are normally referred to as purchases or orders.
However, conversions can only happen through touchpoints or contact points wherever a potential customer comes into contact with your online shop or your company in general, its services and brands, or its products, or your employees. 
These touchpoints are in fact the moment of truth and so, this is where the performance needs to be measured, for which we have put forth the nine most critical KPIs that you need to evaluate in the conversion path for your online e-Commerce store.
To begin with let us assume a shop visitor has made it to your online store, which is an excellent thing, but now you have to get the prospective customer to progress through all the levels in the funnel and measure how well this works.
In most cases, the customer’s journey for an online shopper starts with a search query, and so the quality of your product search is most important for the success of your online shop. 
Hence to maintain focus on the quality of your search and thereafter make necessary adjustments to optimize the customer journey this is what you must find that includes:

1. Search CTR (Click Through Rate)

This metric lets you find out how do your visitor finds detailed information for a product. For this, there are several ways a user might do it, whereby they can perform a standard search or use the suggest function on your website. 
The Search CTR is a KPI that shows the relationship between the frequency of searches on your website for options displayed and the number of visits with clicks on the search function on your online store. 

2. Auto-Suggest Rate

This function in an online store makes use of the auto-complete functions for the desired search query to suggesting the right products to the prospective buyers of your offerings. 
Therefore in comparison to the standard search, with a higher auto-suggest rate and display of the right products, each suggested users have a shorter customer journey and also a correspondingly shorter journey to the checkout. 

3. Standard Search Rate

Most visitors use the standard or normal search as opposed to auto-suggest, and so measuring the Standard Search Rate is another most important KPIs in the customer journey funnel of an online store. 

4. Zero Result Rate
When a visitor uses a standard search function on your e-Commerce online website, for searching for their requirements, it might be that search may not be in range, or the product may not be available which will make the visitor land on a zero-result page. 
Now a business that sells online must remain aware of this since if this happens repeatedly, it might create dissatisfaction among the visitors who might thereafter leave permanently. 

5. Search Exist Rate
Once the visitors do not find the product they are searching for, they will often leave the entire store. The Search Exist Rate is a KPI that shows you exactly this information, which needs to be rectified for the growth of your business. 

6. Search Filter Rate
This KPI shows if the search filters are being used. The greater the search filters are used when a visitor is looking for something very specific and to find the most desired product quickly, it enhances the likelihood of progressing speedily through the customer journey funnel and land with a conversion. 

7. Searches Per User
This KPI shows your business how often your visitors have to search on an average, in the hope of finding the right product, which is also a good indicator for measuring the overall search quality of your website. 

8. Search Conversion Rate
The success of your search optimization skills is reflected in this KPI, which is one of the most important e-Commerce KPIs that illustrates the conversion rate. 
This KPI also shows how effective individual changes to search optimization have been for your e-Commerce online store. 

9. Search Throughput Rate
Finally, this KPI shows the proportion of total revenue that you generated related to your search since all the improvements that you make in your search optimization process if they are successful will show increased revenue generation from the users of your online e-commerce store. 

Conclusion
Hence to answer decisive questions about the customer journey funnel of your online e-Commerce website, measuring and improving the performance of these KPIs will not only let your business find out which search filters are most useful, or which products are placed in the shopping basket together but also let your business know which search query resulted in customers landing on the zero results page, which when optimized can lead to rapid business growth.