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 your sales. 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 increase your success rate throughout the year and next holiday shopping season.

Analyze your numbers

Once the holiday season passes, dig into the 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.

• 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. Squarespace Analytics lets you see which pages on your site get the most views and other key metrics. Or consider some of the other key ecommerce metrics you can measure.

Understand your customers’ journey 

The “purchasing funnel” is a way 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 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 downward journey, like a funnel, that starts with awareness of your store and hopefully ends in a purchase. This buyer journey breaks down into five parts:

1. Learned about your store or products

2. Visited your online store

3. Viewed a product

4. Added a product to cart or started checkout

5. Purchased a product

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 tend to leave your funnel, and in what numbers. Then use that data to fine-tune your approach so that your customers complete that journey 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 details about your product? 

Learn more about sales and marketing funnels

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 you can experiment with. 

Some items might be selling more because they are simply more trendy, unusual, or useful. But for the products with the highest sales, consider if your sales approach 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. Once you have an idea of what's working for your most popular products, you can apply that to your entire product collection.

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 sending people to your site. Once you understand that, you can use this checklist to improve your search engine optimization (SEO). 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 make a plan for your business over the next several months. Look at the numbers to see what drove sales, and where you can push them even further. Also, consider what didn’t work, and if you need to tweak your products or site to get the most out of your store and keep your SEO in top shape. 

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

This post was updated on September 15, 2023.