Shopify Analytics: Top 5 Shopify Metrics You Must Track to Level Up Your eCommerce Store Performance
Shopify Analytics: Top 5 Shopify Metrics You Must Track to Level Up Your eCommerce Store Performance
Dealing with Shopify analytics can be a little bit overwhelming, however, if you want to succeed in this business, you can't ignore the importance of reading and analyzing your analytics.
In this blog post, I'm going to show you the five metrics that you should be tracking on your store in order to be able to improve your store performance and boost your business.
A better understanding of the eCommerce framework
Before starting with our topic and discussing these five metrics, you should first understand how true successful e-commerce business works.
In order to create a successful e-commerce business, this business should be able to attract traffic, convert a part of this traffic into customers, and retain those customers.
If your e-commerce business is not able to do any of these three steps, it's very difficult for it to succeed and it's very difficult for you to convert your business into a sustainable business that can live for years.
I explain all of this and more in this FREE Workshop.
The metrics we are going to discuss are related to these three steps (Attract, Convert and retain).
- Some of these metrics will help you to monitor the traffic you are receiving
- Some of them will show you how much of this traffic you are able to convert into customers
- Some of them will show you how much you are able to retain your customers
- Some of these metrics will help you to monitor the traffic you are receiving
- Some of them will show you how much of this traffic you are able to convert into customers
- Some of them will show you how much you are able to retain your customers
So before reading this post I recommend you to take my free workshop and watch it because this workshop will greatly help you to understand more the e-commerce framework and why these five metrics are extremely important and why you should be always tracking them and following them in order to be able to improve your business.
If you prefer to watch the video version of this blog post you can find it here below
Metric #1: Number of Sessions
The first metric I am going to talk about is “Sessions over time”, and it is related to traffic.
I will start by explaining the difference between visitors and sessions:
- Visitors: are the people who visit your store
- Sessions: are the visits which means each visitor can make several sessions or several visits.
In order to check this metric, you need to go to the Shopify dashboard and under analytics, you go to your online store sessions.
From your Shopify dashboard, you can change the period of time when you are checking the results. So you can check the metrics, in the last 7 days, 90 days, year today, and so on. And you can even choose customized days depending on what you are looking for.
Try to keep your time window wide (90 days for example) so you can spot any changes, drops, or spikes easier.
To access all the reports, you click on view reports ( see below gif)
You can see results per day or per month and we can as well add columns if we wish to see more information. ( See below gif)
Here There are many things that you should be analyzing:
- Which channel is the channel that's bringing you the most of your traffic,
- Where you are receiving this traffic from
- Are you improving your traffic number or not
Let’s take this example in the below screenshot. We have added the column showing the traffic source, to judge which channel is performing better for us.
We can easily notice that google is one of our best channels compared to Instagram or to Facebook.
So what conclusion can we take from this:
- If we are doing some kind of google marketing or SEO, this means we are doing well in the area
- Instagram is a better channel for us than Facebook
- Pinterest and Facebook perform almost in the same way
You can also compare your session number between 2 different periods. This can help you to figure out whether you are improving your numbers or not.
You can also compare your session number between 2 different periods. This can help you to figure out whether you are improving your numbers or not.
so this is it for the first metric now let's move to the second metric
Metric #2: Conversion Rate
Our second metric is the conversion rate. This is one of the most important metrics because it shows how many people you are converting into customers.
Shopify allows you 3 different conversion rates and the 3 of them are important:
- Add to carts
- Reached checkouts
- Sessions converted
As you can see that this conversion rate is going down as far as I move forward in the funnel.
so in order to improve this conversion rate, the final one and all of them actually, you have to watch one of my previous videos where I have talked about how to improve and optimize your store.
it's very important to analyze these three numbers and see if you can spot a problem there.
If for example many people are adding your products to the cart but very few of them are moving to the checkout phase, this might mean that there is a problem in your cart page or if for example, many people are reaching the checkout phase but they are not buying your product, maybe you have a problem with your shipping fees so you have to analyze these numbers and see if you have a very big problem in someplace and you have to fix this problem.
Metric #3: The Average Order Value (AOV)
This number is extremely important and it reflects how much a customer is spending during one purchase on your store.
Improving this number is extremely important because it means that you will be improving your profit out of the same client during the same visit.
So if you are paying money in order to get your customers to your store namely if you are running ads in order to acquire clients it would be more profitable for you if you increased the amount your customer spend during the purchase.
Tracking this number can be extremely efficient and useful if you are trying out some new marketing strategies like the ones you find here.
The more you can increase your average order value the better because when you increase this metric you can easily start to absorb shipping fees and thus you can offer better shipping fees and this will directly improve your conversion rate.
Metric #4: Store Total Sales
This metric is actually a combination of your conversion rate and your average order value but this metric is very important because it shows if you are making more money and if you are improving your sales with time and if you are improving your profits.
This number will show you how much money you are making out of your store, but it will not show you how much profit you are making.
In order to calculate your profits, you should consider how much you are spending on marketing, on ads and so on,
Keep track of this number because it will show you if your store is growing in sales and this is something very positive.
Metric #5: Returning Customer Rate
This metric is very very important because it shows if your previous customers are satisfied and happy with your products, and it shows if your customers are willing to come back to your store and buy from you.
If you have a low returning customer date this can mean that:
- Your customers don't like your products or your services, and this is something very bad
- You are not doing any kind of remarketing or any kind of back-end marketing system
Your previous customers are your most valuable assets they are people who love you they are people who trusted you before, so they are most probably willing to come back to you and buy from you.
Improving this number can greatly affect your profits and your brand.
Final deas
Reading and analyzing your numbers can help you to start making more informed decisions toward growing your e-commerce business and make it sustainable.
With all the competition out there, it is hard to succeed unless you are applying the right framework to your business. A framework that allows you to continuously attract, convert and retain new customers.
To know more about how to do that, you can check my Free Workshop.
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