Shopify Analytics Dashboard – How You Can Monitor the Performance of Your Business
How do you know that your business is flourishing and not fading? Metrics are the answer since they let you read the data you get from each page visit, comment, order, and other actions. With just a Shopify analytics dashboard, you can see your store’s performance without any complex setup or additional manipulations.
This guide will explain how analytics in Shopify work and point out their pros and cons. The latter would probably be the trigger to run analytics outside of Shopify, which we can also help with.
Analytics in Shopify
With just a click of a button, you get access to the insights generated based on your store’s performance data. For this, find the Analytics menu on the left panel and click on it.
You will see an overview dashboard or Shopify KPI dashboard with multiple reports placed on it. Each report corresponds to a particular metric, for example, total sales or conversion rate.
The Shopify analytics is not limited only to the dashboard. You can also benefit from Shopify reports and Live View of the activity on your store. But since we are here to talk about the dashboard, let’s stick to the plan 🙂
Shopify analytics dashboard
On the dashboard, you can get insights for decision making. Insights are based on the Shopify KPI or metrics, such as average order value. Metrics are derived from reports. So, basically, the Shopify KPI dashboard is a collection of multiple metrics/reports.
Reports displayed on the Shopify analytics dashboard
| Metric/report | Description |
|---|---|
| Average order value | The total value of all orders divided by the total number of orders, including taxes, shipping, and discounts before returns. |
| Online store conversion rate | The percentage of sessions that resulted in orders out of the total number of sessions. |
| Online store sessions | The number of sessions on your online store. |
| Online store sessions by device type | The number of sessions on your online store grouped by the kind of device used to access your store. |
| Online store sessions by location | The number of sessions on your online store grouped by country. |
| Online store sessions by traffic source | The number of sessions on your online store grouped by the source from which the visitors accessed your store. |
| Online store sessions by social source | The number of sessions on your online store originating from social media sources, such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc. |
| Returning customer rate | The percentage of your customers who have placed more than one order on your store. |
| Sales attributed to marketing | Total sales that can be attributed to traffic driven to your online store by marketing efforts. |
| Sales by social source | Total sales grouped by social media sources they came from. |
| Sales by traffic source | Total sales grouped by the type of traffic sources they came from. |
| Sales by POS location | Total sales grouped by POS location. If you have point of sale locations. |
| Sales by staff | Total sales grouped by each staff. If you have point of sale locations. |
| Top landing pages by sessions | The top pages where visitors entered your online store and the number of sessions associated with each page. |
| Top products by units sold | Products with the most individual units sold from all sales channels. |
| Top referrers by sessions | External websites from which the most sessions came to your online store. |
| Total orders | Total number of orders made across all sales channels. |
| Total sales | The value of all orders across all sales channels. Total sales = gross sales − discounts − returns + shipping + taxes. |
Date filters for Shopify KPIs
Date range is the only filter available at the native Shopify analytics dashboard. You can use a predefined range, such as Last year, or specify a custom one.
You can also enable the comparison to the previous period to get more insights.
Shopify KPI dashboard update frequency
How fast is your data on the Shopify analytics dashboard updated? Shopify won’t update the dashboard automatically; you’ll need to manually refresh the browser to refresh the dashboard.
In most cases, the changes to your Shopify store are reflected on a dashboard with a delay of up to a minute. For example, if an order is placed at 9:23:00, it may not yet be reflected in a dashboard loaded at 9:23:30. With a high dose of probability, it will appear within the next 30 seconds or so and once the dashboard is refreshed.
For some metrics, such as online store conversion rate, the daily data updating can take up to 48 hours to complete. Such a delay is caused by the tests searching for unwanted traffic and the following removal of the unwanted data from the report.
Can you add/remove reports within the overview dashboard?
The Shopify analytics dashboard is available by default with a fixed set of reports. So, you can’t add reports to or remove them from your Shopify KPI dashboard. This is one of the many reasons why Shopify users tend to analyze their data outside of Shopify.
Why you should have an analytics dashboard outside of Shopify
Freedom is what people value most of all. This refers to the freedom of choice, freedom of thinking, and, of course, freedom of customization 🙂 With Shopify analytics, you are rather limited in features and functionalities. You can’t select a custom set of reports on the KPI dashboard, you can’t add custom metrics to it, you can’t visualize the data in the way you want. But you can do all of this outside of Shopify in a spreadsheet app or data visualization tool.
Build a new Shopify analytics dashboard using a third-party tool
To create your custom Shopify KPI board or a Shopify sales dashboard, you can use multiple options, from regular spreadsheet apps like Google Sheets to advanced data visualization software like Tableau. Not to mention, the free and paid dashboard templates provided by third-party solutions. Whichever option you choose, you’ll need to go through three essential steps:
- Choose metrics to add to the dashboard
- Automate exports of data from Shopify
- Set up calculations and visualizations
Metrics to use
The selection of metrics is not a big deal. You can simply take the predefined metrics from the native Shopify analytics dashboard and expand them as you wish. For example, the Total Sales in Shopify is calculated with the following formula:
Total sales = Gross sales – (Discounts + Returns) + (Taxes + Shipping)
On your dashboard outside of Shopify, you may exclude Shipping costs from the formula and edit it in another way. Here are some other metrics that you can locate on the dashboard:
- Top products sold
- Top products in demand
- Top product types
- Net sales
- Average products per order
- Average order value
- Total discounts
- Total returns
- Ordered quantity
- Returned quantity
- And so on
Automated data export from Shopify
You can export data from Shopify manually and automatically. The latter is what you need to build a self-updating dashboard. To automate data exports, it’s better to opt for a reliable connector that allows you to set up a schedule for data refresh. For example, if you’re using Google Sheets or Excel to build a dashboard, you can use Coupler.io and one of its integrations:
Coupler.io is a data integration solution for scheduling exports from Shopify, Pipedrive, Airtable, and many other sources. In addition to the already mentioned spreadsheet apps, you can also load data from Shopify to BigQuery as a destination. All you need to do is choose the apps to load data from and to and configure them respectively.
You can also connect Shopify to Power BI using Microsoft Excel as a destination.
Then you can set up a schedule for automatic data refresh. For example, you can choose the 1 hour frequency. This means that your dashboard will be updated on its own every hour.
We’ve already covered the details in the Shopify Export Data guide.
Note: For each metric, you’ll need a specific type of data to load from Shopify. For example, to calculate Top products in demand, you’ll need information about products on your Shopify store. And so on.
The dashboard
The final step is to transform the data you’ve exported from Shopify. This involves calculations, filtering, conditional formatting, adding charts, and so on. Turn on your imagination to arrange the metrics and visualize the data on your Shopify KPI dashboard.
For example, we build a dashboard that calculates the number of orders and payments made per month.
For this dashboard, we exported the orders data entity from Shopify and enabled the automatic data refresh at every month frequency…but this frequency seems too sluggish. In large stores, the numbers change rapidly. So, refreshing the data only every month will result in working with very outdated data. You could use the monthly schedule only for some accounting reports where you need to submit a monthly summary report.
Coupler.io allows you to reduce the data refresh frequency to up to every 15 minutes! For this dashboard, the daily update suits best.
As for the calculations, here are the formulas we used:
Formula to calculate orders per month:
={"Orders"; ArrayFormula(IF(LEN(D2:D)=0,, IFERROR(VLOOKUP(D2:D, QUERY(EOMONTH('Shopify orders'!T2:T, -1) + 1, "SELECT Col1, COUNT(Col1) GROUP BY Col1", 0), 2, false))))}
'Shopify orders'!T2:T– the created_at column of the orders data exported from Shopify
Formula to calculate payments per month
={"Payments"; ArrayFormula(IF(LEN(D2:D)=0,, IFERROR(VLOOKUP(D2:D, QUERY({EOMONTH('Shopify orders'!T2:T, -1) + 1, 'Shopify orders'!BU2:BU}, "SELECT Col1, SUM(Col2) GROUP BY Col1", 0), 2, false))))}
'Shopify orders'!T2:T– the created_at column of the orders data exported from Shopify'Shopify orders'!BU2:BU– the total_price column of the orders data exported from Shopify
Formulas to calculate growth
Orders
={"Growth"; ""; ArrayFormula(IF(LEN(E3:E)=0,,IFERROR(E3:E/E2:E-1)))}
Payments
={"Growth"; ""; ArrayFormula(IF(LEN(G3:G)=0,,IFERROR(G3:G/G2:G-1)))}
With the calculations ready, it’s a matter of a few clicks to add and customize a chart. In our case, we used a line chart for orders and a column chart for payments.
This is a very plain example of a custom Shopify analytics dashboard. However, the idea is that you can and probably should work with your data without the limitations of Shopify to power up your performance analytics.
Shopify analytics dashboard: Is the native or external option the best?
The main advantage of building a KPI Shopify dashboard in an external tool is customization freedom. You can add and remove metrics, use custom formulas and calculations, as well as versatile formatting features. All this can be done from scratch or on the top of a template.
The Shopify analytics dashboard won’t give you any customization freedom. So, you should understand that you’ll have to work with the preset collection of metrics. If you’re okay with this, then custom analytics is not your way so far. However, when the business grows, the analytical purposes grow as well. It may happen that you’ll get back to this in some time. Good luck with your data!
