The Importance of Measuring Online Success for Frozen Food Brands

If your frozen food brand has an online eCommerce platform, you need to be able to gauge the success of your marketing and other efforts. If you’re not measuring your online performance, you won’t be able to determine which steps to take to optimize it. You might believe that you’re doing well with your frozen food business, but you won’t have a clear idea of your performance without meaningful data.

Why You Need to Measure Your Success

eCommerce businesses of all types need to keep track of their success online. If they fail to do so, they’re likely to find themselves falling behind more proactive competitors. This also applies to frozen food and other food eCommerce brands. With so many brands offering these products, you need to be able to determine how well your efforts are succeeding. Based on this data, you can make the right decisions when optimizing your online campaigns.

The key is to track the right key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics based on the goals you want to achieve. For example, if your goal is to attract a certain number of leads, you’ll want to look at conversion rate metrics. With the right goal set, you can select the most appropriate KPIs and corresponding metrics to track using analytical tools such as Google Analytics.

Top Metrics to Track for Your Frozen Food Brand

There are certain benefits that come with the DTC model that may make it more compatible for your business than going through retailers. The following are some of the main benefits of DTC for frozen food brands and others:

1. Website Traffic

When measuring the performance of your website, one crucial metric to look at is website traffic. This measures the number of visits your website receives from new or previous visitors. High website traffic indicates that many people are finding your website, either on search engines or other sources.

2. Conversion Rate 

Another metric that you will want to track to gauge success is conversion rate. This tracks the number of people who visited your website and converted into customers. You can specifically measure this metric by dividing the number of site visits by the total amount of transactions. For example, if your website receives 300 visits and 20 of those culminate in transactions, you would have a conversion rate of over 6%.

Conversion rate is among the most important metrics because it indicates how successful you are at encouraging purchases. A high conversion rate could indicate compelling marketing or eCommerce experiences, or a high-quality product that keeps people committing to purchases.

3. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) 

This metric involves a number of factors. It measures the total value that a customer brings to a company throughout their relationship. Specifically, it entails comparing the business’s predicted relationship with the customer to their current revenue value. By measuring CLV, or CLTV, you can better determine which customers are your most valuable.

Once you’ve acquired repeat customers, you can use CLV to figure out roughly how much the customer is likely to continue to spend. This helps you identify valuable recurring revenue streams that can supplement new customer transactions.

4. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) 

Many eCommerce brands may want to acquire customers through paid search and social ads and other more organic channels, but the fact is that you will spend money on customer acquisition. This is particularly the case when starting out and waiting to gain more traction online.

As such, you will need to track customer acquisition cost, or CAC, to determine how much it costs you to acquire each new customer. CAC accounts for the total number of sales along with the costs of marketing your brand within a set period of time, followed by dividing this number by the number of total customers acquired.

Some potential sources for your customers that can come with certain costs may include social media, email marketing, and paid advertisements.

5. Cart Abandonment Rate

The cart abandonment rate is something that no eCommerce business should ever see get too high. This measures the percentage of leads who add products to their shopping cart, only to abandon them before completing the checkout process. Oftentimes, these shoppers are simply not committed to the purchase even though they want the product. They might change their mind in the event they find another deal, or they simply may become distracted.

If your cart abandonment rate is too high, you may want to revisit your checkout process to see if there are any bottlenecks keeping people from converting. Your process might include too many steps, or there might not be enough options to optimize convenience, such as guest checkouts or convenient payment methods.

6. Average Order Value

The average order value takes into account the average value of each transaction on your site. AOV connects to CLV in that it will increase as you attract more loyal customers, which will lead to increased customer lifetime value.

You can increase AOV by encouraging upsells during the checkout process, getting customers to sign up for loyalty programs, and product multipliers that allow customers to purchase more of the same product at a better value.

7. Bounce Rate

While high website traffic is good to have, it won’t mean much if you have a high bounce rate. The bounce rate shows the percentage of people who visit your website and wind up leaving before exploring any further.

There are several potential reasons for a high bounce rate. One primary cause is often a lack of relevant content—people might visit from a search engine and simply not find what they expected to see. Poor user experience (UX) design and slow page loading speeds can also lead to a high bounce rate.

Track the Right KPIs and Metrics to Measure Your Online Success

Using these metrics and others, you can track the KPIs that help measure your eCommerce website’s performance. Based on what you learn, you can take the necessary steps to optimize your website and off-site marketing efforts.

Want to find out how to grow your frozen food brand online? The experts at Gray Growth Logistics can help you get the results you want from your eCommerce efforts. Contact us to learn more about what our consulting services can do for you.