There is so much noise around ecommerce that it’s easy to focus on the wrong problems.
We often hear publishers coming to Supadu for the first time say, “Our website traffic keeps going down.”
But do you actually need more traffic, or do you need to generate more value from the traffic you already have?
Not all traffic is equal. Thousands of visitors who were never likely to buy are far less valuable than a smaller number of readers arriving with genuine purchasing intent.
Pageviews can tell you how many people visited your website, but very little about whether they found what they wanted, discovered a book or completed a purchase.
For publishers, the more useful metrics are the ones that show how readers move through the journey:
- Conversion rate – how many visitors actually buy?
- Average order value – how much does each customer spend?
- Revenue per visitor – are you generating more value from the audience you already have?
- Add-to-cart rate – are book pages turning interest into purchase intent?
- Search success – are readers quickly finding relevant titles, or repeatedly refining searches and leaving?
- Metadata quality – is your metadata supporting search, filtering, recommendations and discoverability?
- Collection performance – which reading lists, staff picks, award winners and themed collections actually drive engagement and sales?
- Checkout completion – where are customers dropping out before purchase?
- Repeat purchases – are readers coming back?
One particularly useful calculation is:
Revenue per visitor = average order value × conversion rate
It helps distinguish a genuine traffic problem from a conversion problem.
Ecommerce isn’t always native to a publisher’s business. It can sit between IT, marketing, sales and fulfilment, which makes it particularly easy for teams to concentrate on attracting more visitors rather than understanding what those visitors actually do.
The most successful publishing websites don’t just measure traffic. They measure progress through the reader journey.
Because ultimately, it isn’t about how many people visit your website. It’s about how many readers successfully discover, explore and buy their next book.
