Date of publication:
17 Apr. 25Criteria for Evaluating the Effectiveness of an Online Store: How an Entrepreneur Understands that the Resource is Working Towards Results
How many orders does your site bring in every day? And how many it could bring in—if you knew where the traffic ‘leaks,’ why visitors leave without buying, or why one page ‘sells’ while another stalls sales?
Many entrepreneurs think simply: there’s a site, SEO done, advertising works—everything is fine. But ‘fine’ does not equal ‘effective.’ Under the hood of your online store, there could be a dozen errors, stealing your profit daily. And the main thing is—you don’t even suspect.
About 42% of visitors leave the site still on the first screen. They didn’t even see the prices. Just left—and that’s it. No discount, no promotion worked. Why? Because there was no analytics. Nobody looked at how people behave. Without figures, there is no intuition, no marketing, no common sense.
That’s why today we will talk not about ‘high matters,’ but about practice. What really means ‘effective site’? How to understand that it sells, not just spins in search results? What indicators should be checked to avoid draining the budget into nowhere?
This text is for those who want not just to ‘have a site,’ but to use it as a sales tool. If you’re an entrepreneur and you have an online store, it will be one of the most useful reads for the week.
Why an Entrepreneur Should Evaluate Website Effectiveness
There is one thing that most online store owners don’t do regularly, although it can save thousands of hryvnias each month. This is — website effectiveness analysis.
A website alone is not a gold mine. It needs to be constantly checked, adapted, and improved. Even the most beautiful interface doesn’t matter if the customer can’t find the ‘Buy’ button or doesn’t understand how to arrange delivery. And this often happens in reality.
Remember the saying ‘if you don’t measure, you can’t control’? A website that isn’t analyzed is a black hole for the budget. It may look impressive but fails to deliver any impact.
Types of Effectiveness: It’s Not Just About Sales
Sales are the tip of the iceberg. Beneath the surface are numerous ‘micro’ interactions that also matter. By ignoring them, an entrepreneur underestimates the potential of their resource. An online store is not just a sales platform, but a whole mechanism for attraction, retention, and persuasion.
Effectiveness indicators can be broadly divided into two large groups:
- Commercial — these are direct results that can be measured in money: orders, applications, calls, adding products to the cart, completed purchases.
- Behavioral — these are user actions that indicate interest and interaction: page views, scroll depth, time on site, button clicks, switching between categories, product search, viewing delivery or payment conditions.
These behavioral signals are like a client’s facial expressions during a meeting: if you don’t see the reaction, you don’t understand whether they are interested or just politely silent. Behavioral data help identify engagement points: where a person lingers, what interests them, and at what stage they hesitate.
For example, if you see that users are extensively reading specifications but not adding the item to the cart — that’s a signal: either the price is off-putting or the description doesn’t inspire trust. If a person spends 2–3 minutes on the page, views several products, but then disappears — perhaps they are deterred by the checkout process or the absence of reviews.
Knowing the types of effectiveness is like having a map on the road: you are not just moving blindly, but you understand where to slow down and where to step on the gas. And this map gives the online store a chance to turn a chaotic flow of visitors into a logically structured sales funnel.
Key Performance Indicators of a Website: What to Look at First
Imagine that your website is like a salesperson in a physical store. If they stood silently by the register all day, not responding to customers and not helping with selection, how long would you tolerate this before firing them?
The same applies to a website. To understand whether it functions or just ‘stands there’, you need to pay attention not only to the overall number of visitors. Traffic alone means nothing. The main thing is what people do on the site. Do they click? Read? Buy? Or do they just visit, look, and leave?
In this section, we will cover the metrics that should catch your eye first. These are basic but critically important metrics that help you see the real picture: does the site lead to profit or merely ‘move air’? And the main thing — how to interpret these numbers without unnecessary math.
Conversion (Conversion Rate)
Conversion is the very reflection of efficiency. It shows how many people who visited the site performed the desired action. Often this is a purchase, but it can also be a registration or call.
And here is where many get confused: they think that 2–3% is low. In reality, for most niches, this is a normal figure. But it doesn’t mean anything without context. A 2% conversion from 100 visitors is one story. But 2% from 10,000 is a completely different one.
Factors Influencing Conversion:
- Quality of traffic (whether the right people are visiting).
- Clear structure and navigation.
- Calls to action (CTA) that encourage rather than intimidate.
- Transparent information about delivery, payment, guarantees.
Conversion is something that makes sense to optimize first. Without it, any traffic is like sand slipping through fingers.
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is when someone enters and leaves without clicking on anything. They don’t delve deeper into the site, don’t view products, just exit. Like in a store: they walked in, looked around, and left. And what’s worse — it’s often the site’s fault, not the client’s.
A high bounce rate can indicate:
- Mismatched expectations (the person was looking for one thing but found something else).
- Slow site loading.
- Too many ads or pop-ups.
Reducing this metric is not a panacea, but it’s like lowering a fever before an accurate diagnosis.
Average Time on Site and Page Views
These metrics help to understand if the visitor is genuinely interested. If a user spends 8–10 seconds on the site, something might be wrong. Perhaps the page looks complicated or simply fails to inspire trust. But when a person browses products, reads descriptions, navigates through categories, it’s a good sign. Yet again, if everyone reads but no one buys, there’s a problem somewhere deeper in the funnel.
Traffic Sources
This is more important than it might seem. Because not all traffic is equally useful. For example, Facebook ads may bring in people who are just interested, but don’t buy. While Google search brings those who are ready to purchase.
Common sources:
- Organic search (SEO).
- Contextual advertising (Google Ads).
- Social networks (Meta, TikTok, Pinterest).
- Referral traffic (from blogs, partner sites).
Each source should be evaluated separately. Sometimes the whole site works perfectly, but the problem is simply low-quality traffic.
Site loading speed
This is a technical issue, but a critical one. If a page loads longer than 3 seconds, you lose up to 50% of users. And this is not an exaggeration. It is important to consider not only “mobile adaptation,” but also the optimization of images, fonts, and scripts. An online store with poor speed is like a checkout with a constant long queue. People just go to competitors.
How large companies evaluate site effectiveness: cases of Amazon and Rozetka
In large companies, the site is not just a showcase. It is a full-fledged laboratory where every pixel undergoes testing. And no, this is not an exaggeration. At Amazon, for example, they test not only the placement of buttons but also the phrasing of text on them. And all of this has million-dollar consequences.
Amazon regularly conducts A/B tests even for the smallest changes. One case: changing the button from “Learn more” to “See details” on category pages. Result — a 13% increase in clicks and an increase in sales in subcategories of over $30 million per year. This is what is called ROI at the level of one phrase.
Rozetka is keeping up. In 2021, the company updated its internal search mechanics: changed the ranking of results and suggestions during input. Result: product view depth increased by 21%, and category page conversion by 17%. All thanks to search behavior analytics.
The lesson here is simple: website efficiency is not just “launch and forget.” It’s continuous observation, testing, and improvement.
Website Analysis Tools: Where Entrepreneurs Should Start
You don’t need to be an MIT-trained analyst to understand how users behave on your site. The main thing is to have the right tools and read them correctly. Most entrepreneurs intuitively feel when something is “off” on the site — there seems to be traffic, but few orders. However, intuition is not analytics. To make accurate decisions, it is worth relying on facts: how many people come, where they come from, where they “get stuck,” what they search for, and what they don’t find.
That’s what web analytics tools are for — simple, accessible, and often free. With them, you can learn much more than just the number of visitors. Analytics is like an X-ray for your online store: it shows not only the surface but also what is hidden deeper. And the sooner you start looking at your site through this lens, the faster you can improve its efficiency without unnecessary costs.
Google Analytics and GA4
This is the foundation of the basics. Google Analytics shows how many people visit, where they come from, how long they stay on the site, and which pages they view. And GA4 adds an event model to this — you can track clicks, video views, file downloads, and more. We highly recommend setting up goals: for example, form submissions, purchase button clicks, adding items to the cart. This helps clearly see not just how many people came but how many performed a target action.
The first step to effective analytics is understanding who comes to you and what they do on the site. Google Analytics (especially the updated GA4) is a tool without which it’s hard to imagine the analytics of a modern online store. It allows not just counting traffic but understanding user actions at every step.
Capabilities:
- Determining main traffic sources: organic, advertising, social media, email.
- Measuring bounce rates and time spent on the site.
- Analyzing the most popular pages and funnel transitions.
- Tracking events: clicks, scrolls, form fills, downloads.
- Goal settings: click on “buy,” add to cart, complete the order.
Hotjar, Clarity, Plerdy
These services provide a ‘live’ picture of user behavior: heat maps, session recordings, clicks, scrolling. You can see where a person stops, what interests them, and what they ignore. All three tools offer free plans that are sufficient for basic e-commerce analytics. It’s like store surveillance: you can literally see what they look at, where they don’t reach, and where they get confused.
Sometimes numbers aren’t enough. You want to see through the customer’s eyes. That’s where visual analytics services come into play. They help determine what’s really happening on a page: where they click, where they linger, what they ignore.
Capabilities:
- Click, scrolling, and mouse movement heat maps.
- Real-time user session recordings.
- Identification of “dead zones” and areas of interest.
- Behavior analysis on different devices (especially mobile).
- Identifying blocks that cause the user to stop or leave.
PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix
Analyze the technical side — loading speed, page weight, optimization of images and scripts. Even one extra second of loading can reduce conversion by 10–20%. We recommend conducting checks at least once a month: especially after site changes or content updates. And always test the mobile version, as it often ‘lags’ for no apparent reason.
Analytics isn’t just about user behavior, but also about the speed at which they see your content. If a site is slow, no amount of advertising will save it. The user simply won’t wait.
Capabilities:
- Analysis of page loading time (mobile and desktop versions).
- Identification of ‘heavy’ elements: images, scripts, CSS files.
- Check the use of caching, lazy load, font optimization.
- Recommendations for speeding up the site (even for beginners).
- Indicators of Core Web Vitals — metrics important for SEO.
Why analytics changes the game in e-commerce
Often we underestimate the small things. But it’s these that change the game. Sometimes, to increase sales, there is no need to launch a new advertisement. It’s enough to change a button or remove a banner that’s irritating to the user.
Consider this scenario: you spend money on advertising, SMM, content, and people do come to the site… but for some reason, they buy nothing. Everything looks good, but the effect is zero. Familiar? Often the reason lies in the details that aren’t visible without analytics: an inconvenient form, a button that ‘escaped’ below the screen, or too much information that no one wants to read. Online stores that conduct regular analysis show significantly better results even with a smaller budget.
Regular site audits are not an indulgence but a business tool that allows you not just to look at analytics, but to act based on real data. If you haven’t looked into Google Analytics this week, now is the time. The answer to why your sales are stagnant could be hiding there.
Conclusions: How to transition from a catalog site to a site that sells
So, in short — your online store’s site shouldn’t be just a beautiful decoration. It should be a living, dynamic tool that works for you, not just an item to check off in a business plan. And for it to sell, it needs a technical check-up — regularly and honestly, without self-deception.
Don’t think that analytics is just for ‘big business’ or ‘IT specialists’. In fact, it is for those who want to know why users are leaving the homepage, where exactly they get confused in the catalog, and why they abandon the cart at the last step. Analytics doesn’t give you illusions. It provides facts. And with them, you can work.
What can be done right now, without postponing until tomorrow:
- Check if you have Google Analytics or GA4 connected. If not, connect them.
- Check the bounce rate and time spent on the site. If it’s less than 1 minute — there are issues.
- Review loading speed through PageSpeed — especially on mobile.
- Visit the site through the eyes of a customer: is it clear what you are selling, how much it costs, how to order?
And above all — don’t try to do everything on your own. Involve an expert, go through the metrics together, identify bottlenecks, and you’ll be surprised at how much can be changed with just a slight reconsideration of your approach.
Remember: the site you ignore today may ignore the client tomorrow. And the client will go where it’s easier, quicker, and more understandable.
Do you have an analytics plan for your site? Share your experience, just write to us — we will analyze where the site ‘lags’ and how to restore its selling power. Want an audit? Leave an application — and we will contact you.
