The Ecomm Analyst

Most analytics dashboards give you absolute numbers. Sessions, add to carts, checkouts started, orders, revenue. They’re useful, but they’re not where the interesting signal lives. The interesting signal is in the rates between them, and the rates are almost never default metrics.

Take add to cart rate. Every analytics tool I’ve ever used tracks sessions and tracks add to carts. Almost none of them show you the ratio as a built-in metric, even though that ratio (the percentage of visitors who add anything to the cart) is one of the cleanest reads on whether your product pages are doing their job. If it ticks down two points week over week, something on the site changed and you want to know.

Custom metrics in ThoughtMetric let you build that ratio yourself. The way it works is straightforward: you take metrics the platform already tracks, write the equation, save it, and from then on it shows up wherever a default metric would, sliced by whatever dimension you’d normally slice by.

A few of the equations I’ve actually configured:

Add to cart rate. ATCs divided by sessions. The product page health metric. I check this weekly, and any movement of more than a couple of points gets investigated.

Checkout completion rate. Orders divided by checkouts started. This one is the leakiest part of the funnel for most stores and the one operators look at least often. A 60% checkout completion rate and a 75% checkout completion rate are completely different businesses, and the only way to know which you have is to build the metric.

Revenue per session, by source. Revenue divided by sessions, sliced by traffic source. This is the metric that tells you which channels send valuable traffic versus which send tire-kickers. Two channels can have wildly different revenue-per-session numbers even at similar volumes, and the one with the higher number deserves more spend regardless of what its raw ROAS looks like.

New customer share of revenue. New customer revenue divided by total revenue. One number that tells you whether the growth side or the retention side of the business is doing more lifting this month.

None of these are exotic. They’re all just two existing metrics divided by each other. The reason they matter is that having them as saved, sliceable metrics changes how you work. You stop pulling a CSV and running the math in Sheets. You stop mentally adjusting the dashboard. You open the report, look at the column, and make the call.

The bigger point is that the metrics on a default dashboard are someone else’s idea of what you should care about. Your business has rates and ratios that actually drive the decisions you’re making, and almost none of them ship as defaults. The custom metric builder is for closing that gap.

If you’ve never sat down and listed the rates you actually look at when you’re trying to decide something, that’s the place to start. Each one is probably an equation between two numbers you already have.