When it comes to running and growing your online shop, it’s not just about sales. It’s all about using data to ask the right questions and make good decisions. This is why it’s important to understand Shopify Analytics. It gives you an edge over your competitors, and if you don’t use it, you’re losing money.
You can use Shopify Analytics to find out more about your customers, decide which products to sell, and know when to put more effort into a certain marketing channel.
You will learn about the following today:
- What information you get from Shopify Analytics.
- Where you can find the information you need without spending hours looking through useless numbers.
- How to connect Google Analytics to Shopify so you can get more information
- With Shopify Analytics, you can learn how to turn data into useful information that can help you sell more.
In this Shopify Analytics guide, we’ll show you everything you need to know to boost your online sales, like where to find answers to the most common questions store owners have.
What Does Shopify Analytics Mean?
Shopify Analytics is the dashboard for data that is already built into Shopify. It helps store owners understand how their business is doing and how to make it better.
Even though it has some limits (which we’ll talk about later!), it is by far the best. Shopify Analytics is where you should go to find answers to questions like:
- How much did you sell in the past week?
- Which of the things you sold were the most popular?
- From where do your customers come?
- How much do your average orders cost?
- What kind of marketing gives the best return on investment (ROI)?
But it might be hard to find the right information. What do you need to find? How do you make it your own? How can you use data to make a real business choice?! How can you turn the data in Shopify Analytics into insights you can use to make more sales?
Read on to find out more about all of this.
Why Does a Dropshipping Store Need to Use Shopify Analytics?
If you already agree that data is powerful, please move on to the next section. If you’re still not sure if you should use it or not, think about two Shopify store owners who are the same in every way except one:
Business A makes all of its decisions by “going with their gut.”
Business B, on the other hand, makes decisions based on a mix of facts, gut feelings, and experience.
What do you think will make you more money in a year if you put all your money on it? Aside from hypotheses, data can help you figure out what works and what doesn’t when you use it right.
For example, you can make better decisions when you compare KPIs to essential indicators in your Shopify store. When you make better decisions, you waste less money on Facebook ads, your average order value goes up, and you make more money. But in order to act, data must be turned into insights that can be used.
Using Shopify Analytics to make your online store better: Sign in to your Shopify account and choose “Analytics” from the menu on the left.
There are three parts to Shopify Analytics that you can look at:
- Dashboards, Live View, and Reports
- Let’s look at each one in more depth:
Overview of Shopify Dashboard
This is the most important place to learn how your shop works and what your customers do.
This is where:
- Compare how well one sales channel does to how well another one does.
- Check your Average Order Value to see how it has changed because of new products, price increases, or marketing.
- Find out where your customers are coming from and which social media sites bring you the most traffic.
- To see how things have changed, you can use the date selector button at the top left of the screen to compare two different times.
Next, click “View Report” to learn more about metrics that are important. Here are the ecommerce analytics metrics you can use, along with clear explanations of what they mean.
Learn how to measure sales and products
- Total sales: This shows the total amount of money you made from your online store and your POS (Point of Sale), if you have a real store.
- Sales by source is the number of sales that came from social media or other traffic platforms or sources.
- Sales attributable to marketing is the total amount that Shopify thinks your marketing efforts brought to your online store in the form of sales.
- Average order value is the amount of money you make from each transaction. It is calculated by taking the total amount of money you made during the time period and dividing it by the number of transactions.
- The conversion rate of an online store is the proportion of visits that result in a purchase. You can also show the percentage of sessions in which a visitor put at least one item in their basket, went to the checkout, and bought something (this is called “Sessions Converted”).
- Top-selling items: Find out which items sell the most so you can buy more of them or make marketing campaigns to promote them.
Visitor and Customer Metrics
Online shop sessions: Find out how often people visit your store, what device they were using, where they were, what traffic source they came from, and if they came from a specific social media platform, like Facebook, Instagram, or Pinterest.
Top landing pages are the pages on a website where most visitors start their journey.
Returning customer rate: The number of people who have bought from you more than once during the given time period.
Under dashboards on Shopify Analytics are the reports. More reports will be available to you if your Shopify package is more advanced.
Now is the time to look at the reports that are most important.
News about Shopify’s purchase
Acquisition reports show you how many people visit your website, where they come from, and how long they stay. You might be wondering at this point, “How does Shopify define a session or a visitor?” When a customer comes to your online store, cookies are put on their phone or computer.
Shopify thinks that a session is over when you haven’t done anything for 30 minutes or when it’s midnight UTC. The most important thing to know is that if the same person visits your site twice, they will only be counted as one visitor, but they will have two sessions. So, the number of sessions will almost always be higher than the number of visitors.
Behavior Reports for Shopify
Behavior reports are one of the most useful tools you have when it comes to Shopify Analytics.
When you look at Shopify’s behavior reports, you might see:
- How the number of people who buy from your online store has changed over time.
- What do you look for most in online stores?
- How have your ideas for products changed over time?
- How fast your online store loads compared to competitors, and how your sessions are split between landing pages and devices.
- Report on the growth of online stores over time
You can use this report to see how your conversion rate has changed over a certain amount of time, like from one month to the next. This is a great way to find out if the changes you are making to your shop are working.
In a perfect world, you would do A/B split testing to find out which version of the site got the most people to sign up. But most ecommerce businesses don’t have enough traffic and sales to do this. So, the next best thing is to use common sense and feedback from customers to make more people aware of the products that people like.
A true list of the most-sought-after online stores
Does your Shopify store have a search bar? If so, choose the “Top online shop searches report” to find out what people are looking for in your store. “Original query” shows you what your visitors typed, so you can change the names and descriptions of your products to help your customers find what they’re looking for.
Use the “Top online shop searches with no results” report to figure out why certain products didn’t work and add relevant keywords to your product descriptions to make the shopping experience better for your customers.
If people are looking for something you don’t have, you should add it as soon as possible! If people look for a certain product a lot, you could put it on your homepage or make a new category called “most searched for” to make it easier to find.
Report on the Website Cart Analysis
Want to know what to show customers based on what they’ve bought before? The Website cart analysis report shows you how many of your website visitors put one product in their basket and then put another one in afterward.
This is a great way to find connections between products. For example, did 25% of customers who bought a coat also add gloves to their cart? Or did the person who bought hiking boots also buy waterproof pants?
You can also improve how well your products sell by putting a link on the product page that says “Customers who buy X also like Y.” This will make it more likely that they will buy both.
Shopify Live View
Live Image is the last part of Shopify Analytics. It shows a real-time view of a globe map that lets you see how many visitors you have at any given time and where they’re coming from.
Outside of busy shopping days like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, you don’t need to spend much time looking at this. Yes, it’s fun to know where your customers come from and watch the visitor counter go up and down, but are you going to change anything because of this information? Most likely not.
The only time you can break this rule is if customers tell you there is a problem with the store. Shopify Live View can help you figure out if the problem only happened to you or if it is a sign of a bigger problem that is affecting other visitors.
How to Make Your Shopify Store Go Faster
If your business is slower than others, you can make a few simple changes:
You can compress your photos with a Shopify app to reduce their file size and speed up page loading. You might want to try out Crush Pics, Minifier, or SEO Optimizer.
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) are used to make pages that load quickly on smartphones and tablets. Keep in mind that more than half of all purchases are made on mobile devices, so why not use AMP by Amplify Me or AMP by Shop Sheriff?
Switch to a fast, efficient, and responsive Shopify theme that makes important changes to the way your website looks based on the device and screen size of your visitors. Also, if you want a more advanced and detailed analysis of your site’s speed, you can Google “page speed insights” and then use an app or a developer to do what they say.
Conclusion
At the moment, a company’s success depends a lot on showing the most interesting items at the right time, responding to trends, and making deals as user behavior changes. But if you use Shopify Analysis’s best features, you will likely increase the chances that your business will grow. Also, Dropship Corporation is a great place to go if you run an ecommerce store or are a marketer looking for advanced data analysis and professional help to make your business a huge success. There, you can read blogs that give you the best and most useful marketing tips, the most valuable information about how your online business is growing so quickly, and more.
