How to Measure Your Holiday Sales Success

Once the holidays are over, you’ll have an opportunity to reflect on and analyze the success of the busy sales season. No doubt you had some big wins that you'd like to repeat in the future, and you may have encountered a few issues you want to learn from and solve for next year. 

Take stock of your performance and customers’ journeys so you can polish your ecommerce strategy and make a plan to grow throughout the year and next holiday shopping season.

1. Analyze your numbers

Once the holiday season passes, dig into your sales and marketing data and get a better picture of who your customers were and which products they loved. Start with a few basic metrics to get a sense of how you did.

• Site traffic: Look at not only how many people visited your site, but which were your most visited pages. This tells you what visitors are most interested in on your site.

• Main sources of traffic: This can tell you where most customers are discovering your store and where you can invest your marketing energy moving forward.

• Total sales: Note this number so you have a baseline to compare to in the future, or to compare against last year.

• Top products by sales and revenue: Use these metrics to better promote your most popular products or apply what’s working for these products to less popular sellers.

• Average order value: This is another helpful baseline number that will tell you how much customers spend per order. It’ll help to compare against other periods as your business grows.

You can use any of the details from the categories above to help you make a sales plan for the new year. Or consider some of the other key ecommerce metrics you can measure, like sales by product or number of new vs. returning customers.

2. Understand your customers’ journey 

The purchasing funnel is a tool to analyze your customer's journey from when they learn about one of your products to when they buy it. It helps to describe the phases of that buyer’s journey so that you can consider ways to better connect with—or retain—a potential customer, especially if their engagement starts to wane during a specific phase. 

Think of your store as a funnel that starts with awareness of your store at the top and hopefully ends in a purchase at the end. This buyer journey breaks down into five parts:

1. Learned about your store or products: This is when marketing might first influence someone, like seeing a social media post or hearing about you from a friend.

2. Visited your online store: At this point, someone searched for your store or clicked into an email or link you shared.

3. Viewed a product: A potential customer is in the consideration or decision stage, choosing whether to buy from you and potentially comparing you to others.

4. Added a product to cart or started checkout: At this point, customer experience and website usability are key to keep someone in the checkout process.

5. Purchased a product: You’ve earned yourself a new customer, and now your job is to encourage them to return.

In an ideal customer journey, a visit to the site leads to at least one product being viewed, added to the cart, and purchased. But sometimes, customers leave while browsing or during checkout, either because of distraction or a detail in the shopping experience.

Make changes based on customer journeys

Look into your website data to find out when potential customers are most likely to leave your funnel. Then use that data to fine-tune your approach so that your customers complete that step more often than not.

For example, if many of your customers exit your site during checkout, it might be because the process is too long or confusing, or because your shipping costs are too high. If shoppers exit on your store landing page, it might be because it’s hard for them to navigate. Many exits on certain products could suggest price sensitivity.

The Purchase Funnel Analytics panel on Squarespace includes much of this customer journey data. The panel helps you pinpoint which products convert interest into sales at a high rate, and where there are low conversion rates and high drop-offs. This can give you a sense of which products you should continue to invest in, or perhaps make more of, and what products you might need to look at more closely.

If you’re not getting customers through the funnel, ask yourself: 

• Is your store easy to navigate? 

• Is your store organized so people can look around and find what they're looking for? 

• Do you have simple, easy-to-understand page names like Store and Checkout? 

• Do you need to display more or different details about your product? 

Learn more about sales and marketing funnels

3. Lean into your successes

Once you know which of your products are attracting the most sales, you can figure out what you're doing right and what could benefit from experimentation. 

Some items might be selling more because they’re simply more trendy, unusual, or useful. But for the products with the highest sales, consider if your sales approach or marketing strategy might be partly to thank.

You may notice patterns based on whether you spent more time on the product listing or with the product imagery. Look at whether you promoted them more through email or a social media campaign. Were certain discounts or product benefits more exciting to customers than others?

Once you have an idea of what's working for your most popular products, you can apply that across more products.

4. Stay on top of SEO

One of the benefits of the Analytics tool on Squarespace is that you can get a sense of what search keywords are already sending people to your site. These can give you a hint of other search terms to weave into your website copy or product descriptions. When in doubt, consider what someone might search to find your products or your store.

You can also use a search keyword tool, like the SEOSpace extension, to get a sense of what search terms stores like yours rank for. Don’t choose a brand that’s too big for comparison, since many searches will be specifically for that brand—you want to try to capture rankings for more general phrases, like “gemstone pendant necklace”.

As you add products or update your site, you can check the Search Keywords panel to see if these changes are affecting which keywords are bringing people to your store.

Use the time after New Year’s, when most holiday shopping and sales have ended, to take stock of your SEO performance and make a plan for the next several months. Consider SEO best practices you might be falling short on and make an action plan, then measure your performance over the following months. Remember, SEO results take time to bear out—measure your results every 3 months to start.

For more information on how to optimize your online store this holiday season, check out our Holiday Selling Guide.

This post was updated on October 1, 2024.