When used properly, your website can be a powerful sales tool. By allowing customers to buy from you directly, you can often reduce overhead and generate greater sales revenue than if you only tried to sell your products or services through third parties.

However, there is always room for improvement. The good news is that your website provides plenty of information to help you better understand how you can improve your sales processes — or even your products themselves!

Here are a few data points from your website that you can use to get better sales results.

1. Raw Sales Numbers

The great news about selling through a website is that you get access to accurate, reliable snapshots of your overall sales. Data is updated automatically as sales are completed, giving you a live look at which products are selling well and which are not.

With real-time sales information, you can quickly gauge areas of opportunity and potential concerns. For example, products that are selling at a far lower rate could benefit from a limited time discount, additional focus in your marketing efforts, or even being featured as part of a bundle.

For products that simply don’t move the needle at all, you may wish to consider discontinuing them altogether. This way, you can put more of your marketing and manufacturing resources into the items that are generating a profit.

2. Cart Abandonment Rates

Cart abandonment is a common issue in online sales. This term refers to the percentage of website visitors who add an item to their digital shopping cart, but then leave the site before completing their purchase.

Taking a closer look at your cart abandonment rates can help you find ways to streamline the process. Maybe customers have to click through too many pages to complete their checkout. Maybe they are unpleasantly surprised by a last-minute reveal of the shipping cost for their order.

By evaluating the potential pitfalls of your checkout process, you can eliminate the issues that cause people to abandon your site. You can also remarket to those who have abandoned their carts to increase the chance that they’ll come back and complete their purchase.

3. Conversion Rate

A website’s conversion rate refers to the percentage of visitors that go on to make a purchase on your website. Needless to say, improving your conversion rate is essential for making more sales.

Poor conversion rates could indicate that you need to improve your copy or layout, or that your marketing is bringing in the wrong audience.

One great way to improve your overall sales is to look at conversion rate by traffic source. For example, if people who find your site through SEO have a 5% conversion rate, but social media users have a 1% conversion rate, it would make sense to place more of your marketing effort on SEO. Focusing on the audience that is most likely to buy will dramatically improve the ROI of your campaigns.

Parting Thoughts

You don’t have to be a digital guru to gain powerful insights from your website’s sales data. As you take a deeper dive into the numbers, you will be better equipped to identify ways you can better reach and appeal to your customers so you can become more profitable than ever.