Without measuring cold, hard data, how will you know what “success” looks like for your business? Less than 20% of companies felt confident that they could turn their data into insights. However, measuring business success and turning it into strategy is crucial when managing an international expansion, or else your e-commerce venture could fail in the new territories.

Keep reading to discover the key performance indicators (KPIs) you’ll need to monitor when implementing an international expansion.

Establish your international expansion goals

First things first — what do you want to achieve? Without goals in mind, your measurements will have no baseline with which to compare.

For example, you may be a well-established business in your native country, with a lot of brand recognition and customer loyalty. You might already have sales in other countries through partnering with other businesses or featured in their media. Since you have a bit of brand recognition and a few existing customers in this new country, in the first instance, your goals should be focused on growing the customer base ––retaining as many repeat customers as possible, and increasing loyalty. 

However, if you’re looking to expand into an entirely new market — where you’ve never sold before — your goal will then be to garner some brand awareness around your logo, name, and products, and start gaining your first customers from there.

Your ultimate business goals can very much depend on where you are in your business journey. So, when planning your international expansion, bear these business aims and your starting point in mind so you can measure your success from the offset.

How to start measuring business success

Next, we’ll look at some of the main KPIs your business should be tracking to understand your business performance in new countries.

1. Website traffic/visits

If you have your own website, you should be using tools such as Google Analytics to track website performance. 

Generally speaking, the more traffic your website is receiving, the better — more people are looking at your site, exploring the services or products you offer, and hopefully, buying them. 

The number of visits can be revealing. If you receive a lot of traffic but very few conversions (sales), that might show your product descriptions or images need to be more compelling. The number of visitors to your site, versus the number of conversions is known as the conversion rate (CR) and is usually expressed as a percentage.  

If you use another platform to sell your products, such as Etsy, Alibaba or AliExpress, then you can use the platform insights tools to get viewing and conversion figures. Again, if you see  that the conversion rate is low,  then you may want to try:

• Updating product copy and photos
• Being more competitive on price
• Offering faster shipping (if possible)
• Creating a faster checkout process (the fewer clicks needed to buy, the better)

Monitoring this metric, at least monthly, will help you gauge when you’re doing well and when you could be making improvements to sell to your new foreign audience.

2. Repeat purchases 

The number of people who return to your website could show increasing customer loyalty, so monitor this regularly to see if you’re growing your customer base. This metric is known as customer lifetime value (CLV). 

Often in commoditised industries, there is little to no brand loyalty, it all depends on what is convenient for the customer — in this case, you might prefer to only track new visitors and conversions. However, if you would like to increase your visitors’ CLV,  monitor sales figures over a set period and try offering incentives. For example, provide previous customers with  bonus content, extra goods or special deals alongside your products, to give you an edge over competitors.