Measuring the Success of Livestream Shopping: Key KPIs to Track [+ Industry Benchmarks]

While tracking your revenue is essential, you need to remember that live commerce is a channel that needs to be built over time. It requires a long-term strategy.

That said, you should see an upstream trend of growth in GMV, which, even if not ROI positive from the get go, shows you that you’re in the right direction to ultimately make this a profitable channel for your brand.

When measuring sales, it’s important to keep in mind that sales come not only directly from the live event. Customers might be engaged at a live event and later buy at the store, or they might leave a product in the cart, get retargeted by an ad which leads them to purchase but not attributing the purchase to the live but to the ad campaign.

To maximize revenue, it’s highly recommended to repurpose the content from the live and use it after the event for any marketing channel, such as social media and email marketing

Finally, you should also use the content in your eCommerce store to build trust and engagement. The key is to drive traffic to product pages which have video snippets from a live event which can result in extra sales in the long term.

Successful live shopping is all about creating a feeling of connection. You want audience members to feel involved.

Similarly to how you should track engagement across different social media platforms leading up to the event, you also need to look at how your audience engaged during the live shopping event. Interactions, such as comments and likes, give you insight into the quality of your content as well as if viewers resonated with the host.

In addition to providing quantitative data, comments are also a source of qualitative data. By digging deeper than the sheer number of interactions and looking at the actual content of the comments, you can also gain insight into what stood out and which elements not so much. This can come in useful when planning future livestreams.

You should also analyze the time spent watching. The longer a viewer stays engaged, the more likely they are to make a purchase. In addition, try to identify specific times where engagements were higher or lower, to learn what content best appeals to your audience. By analyzing the engagement time and spike points, you can also gain a better idea of which products or segments captivated your audience more.

Engagement over time:

You want to ensure that audience members take a desired action. This action, though, doesn’t necessarily need to be to buy a product immediately. You can consider alternative actions such as visiting the product page, or even better – adding the product to the customer’s shopping cart.

One of the main pain points in e-commerce is the significantly low conversion rate. While in-store shoppers will have a 1:3 chance to leave the store with an extra bag, online conversion rates drop to an average of 1.5-2.5% only.

Seeing a favorite influencer or host showcase the product live before purchasing will undoubtedly lead to increased trust, which will encourage more people to click and add the product to their carts. That’s your first conversion goal. From there, for those who haven’t completed the purchase during the live or immediately after, your retargeting campaigns should do the trick and ensure a successful transaction.

At buywith, we see conversion rates of 40-50% and can reach to as high as over 60% in some cases. Use these numbers as a benchmark for your live event. Of course, the goal changes based on what you define as a conversion goal.

Before your event, it’s crucial to establish what will constitute a conversion for your brand. Once your conversion goals are set, you can tailor your tracking to monitor these specific actions and craft your calls to action accordingly. 

If the conversion rate is low, it could be that there’s a point of friction in the process. For example, if the action being driven is to follow your brand on social media, you should make it easy for them to do so by providing the handle, or, better yet, a direct link. 

Look beyond the total sales and focus on the average amount spent per customer per session. To work it out, you take the total revenue made during the event and divide it by the number of orders you received from users who either attended the live event or watched any of the repurposed content after the event. 

By analyzing this metric, you can assess the spending behavior of your customers during the live shopping event and gain insight into your audience’s revenue potential. For a liveshopping event, the AOV is usually higher. 

If not, you can incorporate cross-selling and upselling. Using cross-selling, you’ll show viewers related products and perhaps even create a bundle. 

Upselling, on the other hand, is all about getting viewers interested in buying the more expensive product. To do this, your host will focus on product comparisons, showing how the more expensive item offers more value. 

Livestream shopping is a great way to increase brand and product awareness. If this is your goal, you’ll want to keep an eye on how many viewers your event attracted, as well as how many eyeballs saw your pre-event promotion. Even if they haven’t attended this time, they are now more aware of the opportunity and might join a future event. 

If your reach is low, consider paying more attention to your marketing strategy leading up to the event. It calls for a multichannel approach. Email, SMS, social media, and influencer marketing all have a role to play in reaching a bigger audience.

Once again, continue to measure reach after the event too. If you repurpose the content and it attracts more unique viewers after the event, those viewers will likely attend your next one.

Return rate accounts for the percentage of sold items that are returned by the buyer. While industry return rate benchmarks are as high as 35-45%, with live shopping, we see a significantly lower return rate which can go down to around 3-5%.

Lower return rates are typically indicative of a successful event showing that customer expectations matched the reality of the product. An additional factor here is that consumers that shop following a live event are making a more conscious buying decision, after having learnt about the product.

If you find that there isn’t a significant difference in the return rate, it could indicate that your product demos aren’t that effective or that answers to queries are inadequate. Invesp, a conversion rate optimization agency, found that about a quarter (22%) of consumers return products because the product they received looks different than what they originally saw online.