Selling online isn’t easy - we hear you - and as data becomes more rich and the ecommerce marketplaces release tools that are more complex, sellers must keep up or risk falling behind the thousands of other sellers in the market. 

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Below are the key terms and metrics online sellers should know when operating an ecommerce business (in alphabetical order): ‍

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• Abandon cart: a shopper has added your products to their cart but does not check out or deletes the products from their cart. Sellers can send the shopper a voucher to encourage check out or send a notification reminder to check out.
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• Ad: keyword or shop ad available for purchase through a $ bid on an ecommerce marketplace. The type of ads varies across marketplaces.

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• Add the cart (A2C): a shopper has added your product to their cart but has not checked out.
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• Ads Items Sold: the total number of units sold generated by buyers from the advertised product as well as other products from your store. All sales are attributed to the last clicked ad.

• Ads Items Sold Contribution: % Ads Items Sold Contribution measures the contribution of the number of products sold generated by the ad to the total number of products sold by the store.
  
  
• Ads GMV: the sales revenue generated by buyers from the advertised product. All sales are attributed to the last clicked ad.
  
  
• Ads Order: the total number of orders generated from the advertised product(s). All sales are attributed to the last clicked ad meaning if a shopper clicked on your ad for an iPhone case, added to cart and also bought a matching AirPods case, both orders are attributed to the iPhone case ad.
  
  
• Ads GMV Contribution: % measure the contribution of the revenue generated by the ad to the total revenue of a store.
  
  
• BAU (Business as Usual): a period of time when your store does not have any special price promotions, gifts, slashed prices available. Typically compared to Campaign / Promotion period to see the efficacy of pricing changes on sales uplift.
  
  
• Clicks: the number of times your ad is clicked from a channel’s search results page by shoppers.
  
  
• Conversion Rate (CR, CvR): measures how often users who click your ad end up purchasing it. ‍
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• CPC (Cost-per-click): CPC is the price you pay for each click on your ads.‍
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• Direct Ads Items Sold: the total number of product units sold generated from ads.‍
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• Direct Ads GMV Contribution: % measures the contribution of the direct sales revenue generated by the ad to the total revenue of your store.‍
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• Direct Ads Items Sold Contribution: % measures the contribution of the units sold generated by ads to the total units sold from the store.‍
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• Gross Merchandising Value (GMV): the total sales revenue of a store including ads versus organic revenue.‍
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• Impressions: the number of times your ad is shown on a channel’s search results page to logged-in shoppers.‍
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• Items Sold: the total number of units sold by a store including ad and organic revenue.‍
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• Order: the total number of check outs made by shopper for a store (there can be multiple items in an order).‍
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• Page views (PV, Traffic): the number of times a shopper has seen your product. One shopper can view your product multiple times to increase the PV. ‍
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• ROAS (Return on Ad Spend): measures the direct sales revenue generated by ads relative to the amount spent on the ad. Ex. if you spend $100 on your ads and generate $500 from the ad sales, your ROAS is 5. Always aim to increase ROAS but be mindful this metric fluctuates based on price. 

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These are only the top 20 keywords and metrics you should be looking at when running an online store to optimise performance. 

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