Most monthly ecommerce reports are terrible. They are 30-page PDFs filled with graphs nobody reads, metrics nobody understands, and conclusions nobody acts on. They take hours to produce and minutes to ignore.
The problem is not data. There is more data available to ecommerce brands than ever before. The problem is curation — knowing which metrics matter, how to present them, and what to do with the information.
After producing monthly reports for our own brands and our clients' brands for two decades, we have refined what works. This is the template we use, the metrics we include, and — just as importantly — the metrics we deliberately leave out.
Why most ecommerce reports fail
Before we get into what a report should contain, it is worth understanding why most reports fail. The failure modes are predictable.
Too much data, not enough insight
A report that lists 50 metrics with no commentary is not a report — it is a data dump. The person reading it has to do all the analytical work themselves. If they had the time and expertise to do that, they would not need the report.
Every metric in a report should be accompanied by context: what happened, why it happened, and what should be done about it. If a metric does not warrant that level of attention, it does not belong in the report.
No comparison framework
A conversion rate of 2.3% is meaningless without context. Is that good or bad? Better or worse than last month? Better or worse than the same month last year? Every metric needs at least two comparisons: month-on-month (MoM) and year-on-year (YoY). Without both, you cannot distinguish genuine trends from seasonal fluctuations.
No action items
A report that does not end with specific, actionable recommendations is a missed opportunity. The entire purpose of reporting is to inform decisions. If the report does not lead to "here is what we should do next", it is not fulfilling its purpose.
Section 1: Executive summary
Every report should start with a one-page executive summary that a busy founder can read in two minutes and understand the state of the business.
What to include
Five key metrics at a glance: total revenue, conversion rate, average order value, total sessions, and returning customer rate. Each with MoM and YoY comparisons, colour-coded green (up), red (down), or grey (flat).
Three-sentence narrative: what happened this month, stated plainly. "Revenue was up 12% MoM driven by a successful email campaign and improved organic traffic. Conversion rate declined slightly due to a high volume of paid social traffic with lower purchase intent. AOV increased 8% following the introduction of bundle offers."
Top three priorities for next month: the most impactful actions based on this month's data. Not a task list — strategic priorities that will move the needle.
If someone reads nothing else in the report, the executive summary should give them a clear, accurate picture of how the business performed and what happens next.
Section 2: Revenue and commercial metrics
This is the section that matters most to founders and finance teams. It answers the fundamental question: how did the business perform commercially?
Essential revenue metrics
| Metric | Why it matters | Benchmark range |
|---|---|---|
| Total revenue | The headline number. Everything else feeds into this. | Varies by business |
| Revenue by channel | Shows which channels are driving growth and which are declining | Organic 25-40%, Paid 20-40%, Email 20-35%, Direct 10-20% |
| Conversion rate | Revenue efficiency. Small changes have large impact. | 2.0-4.0% for well-optimised stores |
| Average order value (AOV) | Revenue per transaction. Indicates upsell and bundling effectiveness. | Varies by category |
| Orders | Volume metric. Helps separate pricing changes from demand changes. | Varies by business |
| Gross margin | Revenue is vanity, margin is sanity. Revenue growth with declining margins is a problem. | 50-70% for DTC brands |
Revenue attribution by channel
Break revenue down by acquisition channel: organic search, paid search, paid social, email, direct, referral, and social organic. This breakdown reveals your channel dependency and helps allocate budget effectively.
A brand generating 60% of revenue from paid advertising is in a fundamentally different position from one generating 60% from organic and email. The first is buying growth. The second owns it. Both can be healthy, but the strategic implications are completely different.
For brands investing in SEO, track the organic revenue percentage over time. This is one of the clearest indicators of whether your ongoing SEO investment is delivering compounding returns.
Section 3: Traffic and acquisition
Traffic metrics tell you whether your marketing is working. But raw session counts are only useful when broken down by source, quality, and cost.
Essential traffic metrics
- Total sessions — with MoM and YoY comparison
- Sessions by channel — organic, paid, email, direct, social, referral
- New vs returning sessions — a healthy ratio is typically 60-70% new, 30-40% returning
- Customer acquisition cost (CAC) — total marketing spend divided by new customers acquired
- Return on ad spend (ROAS) — for each paid channel individually, not blended
- Cost per acquisition (CPA) by channel — what it costs to acquire a customer through each channel
Traffic quality indicators
Session count alone is misleading. 10,000 sessions with a 0.5% conversion rate are less valuable than 5,000 sessions with a 3% conversion rate. Include these quality indicators:
- Conversion rate by channel — organic and email typically convert 2-3x higher than paid social
- Revenue per session — total revenue divided by sessions, giving a single efficiency metric
- Bounce rate by landing page — identifies pages that attract traffic but fail to engage
- Pages per session by source — indicates engagement depth
Section 4: SEO and organic performance
For brands with an active SEO programme, this section is critical. It tracks whether the investment is building the compounding organic asset you are paying for.
Essential SEO metrics
- Organic sessions — total non-paid search traffic, MoM and YoY
- Organic revenue — direct revenue attributed to organic search
- Keyword rankings — movement for your top 20-30 target keywords, tracked weekly
- Organic impressions and clicks — from Google Search Console, showing visibility trends
- New pages indexed — how many new pages were picked up by Google
- Backlinks acquired — new referring domains, focusing on quality over quantity
SEO health indicators
- Core Web Vitals status — LCP, INP, CLS scores for mobile and desktop
- Crawl errors — 404s, server errors, and redirect chains identified in the monthly crawl
- Indexation coverage — pages indexed vs pages submitted, flagging any indexation issues
The SEO section should also highlight which collection pages are gaining or losing position, as these are typically the highest-value organic assets for ecommerce stores.
Section 5: Email and retention marketing
Email is the highest-ROI channel for most ecommerce brands, and the monthly report should reflect its importance.
Campaign performance
| Metric | What good looks like |
|---|---|
| Campaigns sent | 3-5 per month for most brands |
| Average open rate | 35-50% (varies by list quality) |
| Average click rate | 2.5-5% |
| Campaign revenue | Track per campaign and total |
| Revenue per recipient | £0.05-£0.30 depending on segment |
| Unsubscribe rate | Below 0.3% per campaign |
Flow performance
Automated flows typically generate 40-60% of total email revenue for well-optimised brands. Report on each major flow separately:
- Welcome series — conversion rate from subscriber to first purchase
- Abandoned cart — recovery rate and revenue recovered
- Post-purchase — repeat purchase rate and cross-sell revenue
- Winback — reactivation rate for lapsed customers
- Browse abandonment — conversion rate from browse to purchase
Read our deep dive on Klaviyo flows that recover revenue for benchmarks and optimisation strategies.
List health
- Total list size — with growth rate
- Active subscribers — those who have opened or clicked in the last 90 days
- List growth rate — new subscribers minus unsubscribes
- Deliverability — inbox placement rate, bounce rate, spam complaints
Section 6: Site performance and technical health
Site performance directly impacts conversion rate. A monthly check on technical health catches problems before they erode revenue.
Core Web Vitals
| Metric | Good | Needs improvement | Poor |
|---|---|---|---|
| Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) | < 2.5s | 2.5-4.0s | > 4.0s |
| Interaction to Next Paint (INP) | < 200ms | 200-500ms | > 500ms |
| Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) | < 0.1 | 0.1-0.25 | > 0.25 |
Track these for both mobile and desktop, using both lab data (PageSpeed Insights) and field data (Chrome User Experience Report). Lab data shows current performance. Field data shows what real users experienced over the past 28 days.
For Shopify stores, also track total app count and any new apps installed, as app bloat is the primary cause of performance degradation.
Technical issues
- Broken links (404s) — new 404s identified and fixed
- Redirect chains — multi-hop redirects that slow page loads
- Mobile usability issues — flagged in Google Search Console
- Uptime — any downtime events and their duration
Section 7: Customer metrics
Revenue tells you how the business performed. Customer metrics tell you whether the business is healthy.
Acquisition metrics
- New customers — first-time purchasers this month
- Customer acquisition cost (CAC) — total marketing spend / new customers
- CAC by channel — which channels acquire customers most efficiently
- First purchase AOV — the average first order value, which indicates product-market fit
Retention metrics
- Returning customer rate — percentage of orders from repeat customers. Healthy range: 25-40%.
- Customer lifetime value (CLV) — average total revenue per customer over their relationship. This is the single most important metric for long-term business health.
- Repeat purchase rate — percentage of customers who make a second purchase within 90 days
- Subscription metrics — active subscriptions, churn rate, subscription revenue as percentage of total
The CLV:CAC ratio
The ratio of customer lifetime value to customer acquisition cost is the ultimate health metric for an ecommerce business. A CLV:CAC ratio of 3:1 or higher indicates a sustainable, scalable business. Below 3:1, you are spending too much to acquire customers relative to their value. Below 1:1, you are losing money on every customer.
Track this ratio monthly and by acquisition channel. You may find that organic search delivers a 6:1 CLV:CAC while paid social delivers 1.5:1. This data should inform budget allocation decisions — something your AOV optimisation strategy can help improve from the CLV side.
Section 8: Actions and next month plan
This is the most important section of any report, and the one most often missing.
What was done this month
A bullet-point list of the specific actions taken during the reporting period. Not vague descriptions like "worked on SEO" but specific deliverables: "Published 4 collection page optimisations targeting [keywords]. Fixed 23 broken internal links. Sent 4 email campaigns generating £X in revenue."
Key insights
Three to five observations drawn from the data that have strategic implications. These are not restatements of metrics — they are interpretations. "Organic traffic from ingredient-specific keywords grew 35% MoM, suggesting our content strategy is working. We should double down on ingredient content next month."
Recommended actions for next month
Five to seven specific, prioritised actions with expected impact and resource requirements. Each action should tie back to a metric in the report and explain why it is a priority now.
Risks and concerns
Any emerging issues that need attention but are not yet urgent. A gradual decline in email deliverability. A competitor gaining ground on a key keyword. A page speed regression caused by a recent app installation. Flagging these early prevents them from becoming crises.
Metrics to leave out
Just as important as what goes into the report is what stays out. These metrics are commonly included but rarely actionable.
- Social media followers — unless you are running a specific follower growth campaign, this number is vanity. Track social engagement and social-attributed revenue instead.
- Total page views — inflated by bots, double-counts, and internal traffic. Sessions are a better metric.
- Time on site (average) — heavily skewed by outliers and tabs left open. Engagement rate in GA4 is a better alternative.
- Keyword position averages — averaging across 500 keywords obscures the metrics that matter. Track your top 20-30 target keywords individually.
- Email list size (total) — a list of 50,000 with 15% active subscribers is worth less than a list of 10,000 with 70% active. Track active subscribers.
The best monthly report is the shortest one that still contains everything the reader needs to make good decisions. If a metric does not lead to an action, it does not belong in the report.
A good monthly ecommerce report is not a document you produce because you should. It is a decision-making tool that drives the business forward. Every section should answer a question. Every metric should have context. Every insight should lead to an action.
If your current reports are 30-page data dumps that nobody reads, it is time to redesign them. Start with the executive summary, add the metrics that inform decisions, and end with clear actions. Everything else is noise.
If you want to see what our monthly reporting looks like in practice, or if you want help setting up a reporting framework for your ecommerce brand, start a conversation. We will show you exactly how we report for our retainer clients — no 47-slide deck required.
