Shopify Analytics Explained
Nowadays, the words eCommerce and Shopify are synonymous.
The rapid growth of eCommerce over the last number of years has brought a new era of data-driven decision-making for businesses.
Gone are the days of handing out fliers to gather information on your target market. Software, such as Shopify Analytics, allows you to understand exactly who your customers are, which products to sell to them, and which marketing channels to focus on to reach them.
Being able to successfully understand and utilize the data collected by Shopify Analytics will give you a competitive advantage and allow you to efficiently grow your eCommerce store.
Let’s take a deep dive into Shopify Analytics!
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What is Shopify Analytics?
Shopify Analytics is Shopify’s very own built-in data dashboard. The software provides you with various reports on your eCommerce store. This allows you to review your store’s activity, get insight into your visitors, analyze your store’s speed and evaluate the overall success of your online business.
It is a built-in feature, meaning the suite of tools is readily available and user-friendly.
The tool is available to all Shopify merchants, however, the depth and availability of report types depend on your Shopify plan.
These reports are extremely useful for Shopify store owners and provide rich insights, such as:
- Where are customers coming from to our store?
- Which marketing channel is proving most effective?
- How many products did my store sell this month?
- What was the most popular item sold this year?
- What was our Average Order Value?
As you can see, Shopify Analytics can help you make data-driven decisions to optimize your store’s performance in a wide variety of areas.
Shopify Report Types
Today we’re going to focus on the types of reports that are available to all customers free of charge.
If you’d be interested in learning more about the additional paid reports for Shopify, let us know! 😊
For now, let’s examine the data provided in the free Shopify reports.
Acquisition Reports
The acquisition reports show you your store’s visitor data. It focuses solely on visitor information and doesn’t show information regarding converted sales or the number of orders.
This data is gathered using site cookies, and it reveals useful information such as:
- The number of visitors
- How many times has the individual visited your site
- The length of each of their visits
Inventory reports
These reports provide useful information on your product stock. It can be used to examine a month-end snapshot of your entire inventory, track the quantity of stock sold/remaining, observe the percentage of inventory sold per day, etc.
Another handy feature is the “Days left in inventory” which notifies you when a restock is necessary and which products are running low.
This data will ensure that you never run into any supply chain issues and always have the right amount of inventory available for your eager customers!
Behavior Reports
Behavior reports deal with customer behavior on the site. They inform merchants about the actions taken by visitors so that points of friction or flow can be observed.
This report can show you:
- Top products searched for on your site
- Top products searched for on your site with no result
- Store cart analysis
Having this information will allow you to effectively market your store, and increase the opportunity for cross-sells and up-sells! The goal here is to increase your store’s average order total.
Marketing Reports
These reports offer insights into how effective your marketing campaign is running and attracting customers to your eCommerce store. The goal of this report is to increase your conversion rate.
It is incredibly useful in helping you understand what brings shoppers to your Shopify store. Once on your site, it can identify what converts them into paying customers.
From this data, it extrapolates information on which of your marketing channels are resulting in the highest number of customers with the highest value to you.
Shopify Analytics vs. Google Analytics vs. Optily
All these platforms offer unique features and benefits, but which should you use?
Shopify Analytics
Shopify Analytics is very user-friendly. The software is integrated into your Shopify store making it very accessible. The core metrics and reports allow you to successfully optimize your Shopify store, to a certain extent.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics offers an extremely in-depth analysis of activity across the Google world. You create your own personal custom dashboard and reports to focus on the core metrics that you care about. You can read more about it in our What’s new with Google Analytics 4 article.
Optily
Optily is a revolutionary digital ad spend manager, that brings in ad data from all sources including Google Analytics and Shopify Analytics.
More than that, Optily instantly unifies your Facebook Instagram, Google, and YouTube ad data, Google Analytics metrics, and Shopify sales data for the ultimate solution to ad spend performance.
Optily saves you hours every day and delivers maximum return on your advertising investment.
You can join our waitlist to be among the first to use our new Shopify App and get some exclusive early-bird perks like discounts and free consulations!
