As a business owner, analyzing and optimizing the impact of your marketing will be an ongoing process. By taking the time to look at your analytics, you can avoid spending money on tactics that aren’t working. As a Shopify customer you have access to detailed analytics that can help you make smart choices about how you market your products and services.
In this lesson, I’ll walk you through your analytics so you can better understand what your reports are for. On your Shopify admin, click “Analytics.” Here, you’ll see that you have a dashboard, reports, and live view. Let’s look at dashboard first.
The dashboard shows key sales orders and online visitor data. You can see at a glance how your store is performing across all your sales channels for any date range. The dashboard shows the most valuable metrics to give you insight into the performance of your store and the behavior of the visitors on your site.
Let’s view our sales report. Click “View report.” You can select a date range or export data. Our store is new, so we don’t have any data yet. Take some time to familiarize yourself with this dashboard, so you know what Shopify can track for you.
Additional insights can be discovered by using Google Analytics on your Shopify store. It’s enabled from within the online store preferences. Now let’s look at reports. Shopify reports are divided into categories, such as sales, acquisitions, customers, and behavior to help you better understand your store data and how visitors are interacting with your site.
Depending on your Shopify plan, you have access to different types of reports. When you upgrade your plan, you will automatically have access to past data for the new reports that are made available to you. There are three main categories of reports you should look at when you’re just starting out.
These are sales, acquisition, and behavior reports. Now let’s look at live view. The live view gives you a real-time view of the activity on your store. You can use live view to monitor activity on your store and see a quick view of today’s sessions, orders, and sales.
This is especially helpful to you during high traffic periods like sales, so you can see the results of your marketing efforts. In the next lesson, I’ll show you how to join the Shopify community and how to get support if you have any questions about building your Shopify store.