How to Use Shopify Analytics: A Beginner's Guide

• What is Shopify Analytics?
• Why is Shopify Analytics Vital to Your Online Store?
• Key Metrics and Reports of Shopify Analytics
  • • 1. Live View Metrics
    • 2. Metrics on Overview Dashboard
    • 3. Reports on Shopify Analytics
• 5 Ways to Use Shopify Analytics
  • • 1. Optimize your storefront
    • 2. Understand your customer demographic insights
    • 3. Optimize your marketing and advertising efforts
    • 4. Identify your key sales channels
    • 5. Identify your best-selling products

 

What is Shopify Analytics?

This is Shopify's built-in dashboard which helps e-commerce store owners understand how their business is performing and how to improve on the same. With Shopify Analytics, you can discover, interpret, and communicate data patterns related to online business. 

 

It is a place to get the solutions to questions like:

• How many products did we sell last week?
• What were the most popular items we sold?
• Where are our customers coming from?
• What's our average order value?
• What marketing channel is generating the highest Return On Investment (ROI)?
• How did your Black Friday marketing campaign perform last year?
• What products are people searching for most?

 

Why is Shopify Analytics Vital to Your Online Store?

If you are wondering why analytics and reports really matter, here are the main reasons:

• It makes better business decisions
• It optimizes your marketing, as well as advertising and spending
• Promotes your brands on the right sales channel to sell winning dropshipping products.
• It identifies the best products to sell online and offline
• It readily understands the consumer's expectations and demands
• It meets consumer demands with better Inventory Management
• With data-driven planning, it enhances your profit margin
• It helps in keeping your finances in control
• It also helps you to manage your taxes well

It is time for us to tackle all the Shopify Analytics explicitly, reports one by one and eventually, how you can use them effectively and run a successful business.

 

Key Metrics and Reports of Shopify Analytics 

1. Live View Metrics

This gives you a real-time vision of all the activities happening in your store. Among its contents are a world map and a globe that show you the origin of the activities in your store and key matrices to let you know what the activity is resulting in 'right now.' It relays the information about your store's local time.

 

Metrics Shown in the Live View

Metrics	What it indicates
Real-time visitors	The number of active visitors on your online store in the past 5 minutes
Total sales	This is equal to (the gross sales - discount – returns + shipping fee + taxes)
Total sessions	The actual number of sessions in total on your online store since midnight in the local time zone of your store.
Total orders	This metric shows the total number of orders completed on your online store and from other sales channels since midnight.
Top location	It shows the geographic regions where the most visitors to your online store are.
Top products	These products have generated the highest total sales for your online store since midnight of your store's local time zone.
First-time customers	These customers haven't previously placed an order from your online store.
Returning customers	Customers that previously placed an order from your online store.
Customer behaviours	Active carts: In the last 10 min, the number of sessions with one or more items added to their shopping carts. Checkout: The number of sessions in the last 10 minutes with customers adding one or more items into their shopping carts, proceeding to the checkout and submitting their contact information, such as their names, address and so on. Completed:  The number of sessions on the last sessions with customers adding one or more items to their shopping carts, proceeding to the checkout, and then actually completing purchasing the items.

 

2. Metrics on Overview Dashboard

With the overview, you can fully acquire a basic understanding of how your shop operates and eventually learn about your customers' activities.

The following are some of the activities you can safely perform on the dashboard:

• Compare one sales Channel against another;
• Evaluate your order value to observe how it has fluctuated as a result of new goods, price hikes, or marketing efforts;
• Find out where your customers are coming from and discover the social media platforms that bring you the most traffic;

You can compare one period of time to another by using the date selector button at the top-left of the screen to observe how things have changed. Thereafter, you can view 'Report' to dive into essential metrics; 

Below are some key e-commerce analytic metrics, along with concise definitions.

 

Sales and Product metrics: 

• Total metrics- the total revenue you brought in via the online stores and your Point of Sales in case you possess a physical brick-and-mortar store.
• Sales by Source- this is the number of sales from Social Media Channels or other traffic platforms or Sources.
• Average order value - the total amount of money you make each transaction, computed by totalling your income for the period and dividing it by the number of transactions.
• Sales attributable to Marketing- the total amount of sales that Shopify estimates were generated to your online store as a result of your marketing efforts.
• Top selling items- determine which products sell the most to acquire more inventory or design marketing campaigns that ensure the full promotion of these products.

 

Metrics for Visitors and Customers

• Online shop sessionsmake it possible for you to know how often consumers visited your store, including the device they were using, where they were, what profit Sources they came from, and whether they came from a specific social media platform, e.g. Facebook, Pinterest or even in the Instagram.
• Top landing pages- determines the website pages where most of them commence their trip.
• Returning customer rate- Show the proportion of customers that bought items from you more than once within the specified period of time.

 

3. Reports on Shopify Analytics

These are parts under the dashboard that help with analytics for Shopify. The more complex and sophisticated your Shopify Package is, the more reports you can access.

 

Detailed analysis of the most relevant reports 

• Report on Customer Acquisition of Shopify

This provides information about your website sessions over time, by the referrer, and by geography, letting you see how much traffic you have and where it is coming from. But then, what exactly is Shopify's definition of a session or a visitor? When a shopper visits your online business, they place cookies on their smartphone or computer.

Shopify considers a session to last 30 minutes of inactivity or when it reaches midnight UTC. One vital point to understand is that Incase the same visitor visits your site two times, they will be counted as one visitor, but two sessions. Therefore, your session count will almost always be larger than your visitor count.

 

Shopify Behavior Report

This is another valuable tool that provides a detailed report for Shopify analysis.

The following are the contributions of this tool:

• What are your online store searches?
• What is the evolution of your product suggestions so far?
• How your conversion rates on your online store have fluctuated with time.
• The rate at which your online store loads in comparison to competitors.
• How your sessions are distributed among landing pages and devices.

 

Report on Online Store Conversion Over Time

This report is mainly to see if the adjustments you are making to your shop are effective, and it may as well be used to analyze how your conversion rate has made strides over a specific period of time.

All you need is to perform A/B split testing to determine which version converts best.

 

Report on Top Searches of Your Shopify Store

You have a search bar on your Shopify store. Slect the 'Top online shop searches' report and learn what your visitors are seeking. Original query makes it possible to display what your visitors typed, allowing you to tweak your product titles and descriptions to improve your consumer experience. 

If people are searching for something you lack in your online store, you should add it as soon as possible! And if you have a lot of searches for a specific product, you may make it simpler to trace by putting it on your homepage or creating a new category named 'most searched for.'

 

Website Cart Analysis Report

If you are thrilled to know which goods are displayed to clients based on their previous purchases, use the Website cart analysis report. This is because it displays the proportion of your website visitors who added one product to their cart and eventually added another.

It is a superb approach to discovering product connections, e.g., did someone who bought hiking boots also buy waterproof pants?

You may also improve your product performance by adding a text link to your product pages that reads, 'Customers who purchase Q also have a preference for R to boost the likelihood that they will add both to their baskets.'

 

5 Ways to Use Shopify Analytics

1. Optimize your storefront

Fully know how visitors land at your store, interact with your site to spot what engages them the most, the moments when they complete a purchase, and when they tend to leave your site. The key to helping you to optimize a visitor's buying journey on the website is customer behaviour insights.

 

2. Understand your customer demographic insights

It would help if you dug deep to gain insight into where your customers come from and their interaction with your storefront. With this, you will have full knowledge about your target market.

 

3. Optimize your marketing and advertising efforts

Your marketing and advertising campaigns can be optimised for a better ROI with a real-time and comprehensive view of store activity and visitor data. For instance, you can double down your sales if you see more traffic coming from a specific location than the others.

 

4. Identify your key sales Channels

Live view is also helpful for you to understand which of the sales Channels give you the best results wherever you launch a new product or even a new deal for your target audience.

 

5. Identify your best-selling products

It is crucial to note that not all products will sell at a similar pace and the orders you get on each may vary based on your target or what's trending in the market. It is easy to see which of your products stand out the most during a period, season or when you launch a specific sale.

 

 

Conclusion

With the existence of technical advancement and the competitive online global market, a company's success currently relies heavily on displaying the most exceptional items at the most appropriate moment, reacting to trends, and providing offers as user behaviour shifts. Shopify Analytic features offer exactly that. With it, you can enhance the chances of business growth to great heights.

I recommend you pay a visit to Dropshipman Blog regularly. The blog articles offer you the best marketing strategies, tips and the most valuable information regarding how to grow your online business.