When it comes to measuring the health of your ecommerce business, it’s easy to focus on revenue metrics because they come from an obvious transaction – the one that made you money! However, this might mean you’re overlooking important micro-conversions along the way. While not as immediately impactful as revenue, things like site search, social sharing, and shopping cart additions can tell you a lot about a customer’s intention to buy.

Being focused on more than just revenue applies SaaS-style thinking to optimizing an ecommerce site. In each case, the customer is giving you something valuable, even though it’s not their dollars…yet.

Earlier this week I moderated a customers-only video chat with the person who fields our customers’ toughest data questions – our VP of Customer Success, Anita Andrews. We covered a lot of non-revenue-generating ground in a short amount of time.

Here are a few of the highlights. The full session is available as a video to RJMetrics customers (contact your Account Manager for details).

What’s a non-revenue transaction an ecommerce site should care about?

I asked Anita what the one micro-conversion is that every ecommerce site should measure and improve. Anita says: email sign-up conversion rate.

What should an ecommerce company pay attention to in their shopping cart data?

I asked Anita about shopping carts, and how they’re taking the place of wish lists for many websites. This led to discussion around learning the best way to measure and interpret cart abandonment.

How can I measure and interpret my internal site search data?

I asked Anita about site search, and she made a bold statement: “If you are paying money to an agency or in-house team member to send traffic to your site via SEM or SEO, you should be paying almost as much optimizing your onsite search.” Here’s the discussion that ensued:

Mining your site search data should be a weekly practice so you can make sure your site is matching the customer’s expectation.

Should I be measuring outbound social shares in addition to my inbound traffic?

I asked Anita about social sharing. We see a consistent focus on referrals from social networks, but much less focus on analyzing what pages and products create shares. Here’s her response: