What is Shopify Analytics?
Shopify Analytics is the in-built data dashboard that Shopify offers to eCommerce store owners. It makes it possible for you to understand how your business is performing, and helps you identify gaps as well as opportunities for improvement.
It shows you recent activity, insights into the visitors, online store speed as well as the transactions made on your storefront. You could look at Shopify Analytics as a dashboard that is reminiscent of Google Analytics - you don’t need to switch platforms or tools to measure how your business is faring.
Looking at your Shopify Analytics dashboard would enable you to answer questions like:
- How many sales did you make last week?
- Which products did you manage to sell the most?
- Where are you getting your customers from?
- What is your average order value (AOV)?
- Which marketing channels are earning you the highest return on investment?
Why you should use Shopify Analytics for your online store?
Measuring your Shopify store’s key metrics against KPIs and benchmarks makes it possible for you make better business decisions for your online store. It also enables you to optimize your marketing and advertising spends, promote your brand on the sales and marketing channels that work most effectively for your business, pick the best products to sell, both, online and offline, gain a better understanding of consumer expectations and demands, meet your consumer demand with more effective and efficient inventory management, boost your profit margins with data-driven planning , keep your finances in check, and even manage your taxes in a better manner.
What are the metrics shown in Shopify Analytics?
The analytics page in Shopify Analytics displays the most valuable metrics that offer you critical insights into the performance of your store and the behavior of the traffic you’re sending to your online store through marketing, advertising and other sales channels.
On the analytics page, you will be able to see data in a specific data range that you’d like to measure metrics in. But, unlike what you would see in the Live View on Shopify Analytics, the data is not pulled and displayed in real-time here.
Here are some of the metrics that you could track on Shopify Analytics:
Average order value
This shows you the average value of all orders (except gift cards), divided by the total number of orders that contained at least one product. The order value also accounts for taxes, shipping, and discounts before returns.
Online store conversion rate
Your online store conversion rate lets you see the percentage of sessions that lead to a purchase being made, and is applicable only on the online storefront (not your sales channels).
Conversions are mapped at 3 key stages of a buyer’s journey:
Added to cart: This metric shows you the number and percentage of sessions in which your shoppers added one or multiple items to their shopping carts.
Reached checkout: This metric shows you the number and percentage of sessions in which shoppers added one or many products to their shopping cart and then proceeded to the checkout page.
Sessions converted: This metric shows you the number and percentage of sessions in which shoppers added one or multiple items to their shopping cart, proceeded to the checkout and then went on to complete the actual purchase.
Online store sessions by device type
Your online store sessions by device type shows you the number of sessions on your online store and what kind of device was used by your visitors to visit your store (this metric is only for your online store, and not sales channels). The msot common device types that you can expect to see include mobile, desktop, and tablet.
Online store sessions by location
This lets you see the number of of sessions on your online store sorted on the basis of the country from which these sessions originated (applicable only to online store and not sales channels).
Online store sessions by traffic source
It shows you the number of sessions on your online store according to the way in which the visitors accessed your store.
The most common traffic sources are:
- Search
- Direct
- Social
- Email
Online store sessions from social source
This lets you see the number of sessions on your online store originating from social media platforms that you’re using for your marketing campaigns and are running ads on.
Repeat customer rate
This lets you see the percentage of your customers who have placed more than a single order from your store. The rate is calculated by dividing the number of returning customers by the total customers you have.
Sales by POS location
If you have point of sale/ physical store locations, this metric will let you see the amount of sales that came from each location.
Sales by social source
This lets you see the amount of sales that originated from social media sources.
Sales by staff
If you have a large number of points of sale or store locations, you can use this metric to see the amount of sales that were handled by each staff member.
Sales by traffic source
This lets you see the amount of sales that came from every traffic source.
Top landing pages
This lets you identify the specific pages on which your customers started their sessions on your online store.
Top products by units sold
This helps you figure out which are your best-selling, trending and top products based on the number of units that actually get sold.
Top referrers by sessions
This lets you see the number of sessions that came to your Shopify store from other websites.
Total online store sessions
This shows you many unique sessions occurred on your online store within a specific date range.
Total orders
This lets you see the number of orders that were placed within a specific date range or in all time.
Total sales
This lets you see the sales volumes sorted according to sales channel for all time or in a particular date-range.
Sales attributed to marketing
This shows you the total sales value generated by traffic that came to your store due to your marketing efforts.
