A Comprehensive Guide to Shopify Data & Analytics

Summary

• Shopify provides built-in analytics tools, including a dashboard, reports, and a real-time view, with features that vary by subscription plan.
• Key metrics tracked include sales, conversion rates, customer sessions, and marketing performance.
• Native analytics are limited by 13-month data retention and a last-click attribution model, often requiring integration with external tools like Google Analytics 4.
• Advanced analysis and data integration are possible through Shopify's APIs and the ShopifyQL query language.

Why Understanding Your Store's Numbers Changes Everything

Shopify Data & Analytics refers to the tools merchants use to make decisions about their online business.

Running a Shopify store without paying close attention to your analytics means making business decisions with incomplete information. The data tells you what's working, what's failing, and where your next opportunity might be. Yet many established merchants still rely on gut feelings or incomplete data when making critical business decisions.

Businesses that set and track their goals hit some of their goals 96% of the time, and 41% hit all their goals nearly twice as effectively as businesses that don't track progress regularly. That's not a small edge—that's the difference between steady growth and stagnation.

This guide explains Shopify's data system, from the built-in dashboard to custom analysis. You'll learn which metrics matter for your business, when the native tools are enough, and when you need to build a more capable analytics system.

I'm Steve Pogson, and I've spent over two decades helping e-commerce businesses use their data to increase revenue with Shopify Data & Analytics. Here at First Pier, we've worked with brands like Wyman's Blueberries and Hyperlite Mountain Gear to build analytics systems that inform real business decisions, not just pretty dashboards.

Understanding Shopify's Native Analytics Tools

Shopify includes built-in tools for viewing store performance. Learning to use these tools is the first step in using data for business decisions.

Core Features of Shopify Data & Analytics

Shopify's native analytics provide a good starting point for any merchant. These tools are accessible directly from your Shopify admin panel under the "Analytics" section. The depth of these features often depends on your Shopify subscription plan; more expensive plans generally include more detailed reports and customization options.

The main feature is the Analytics Dashboard. This customizable dashboard presents a collection of data cards, called metrics, which offer a quick summary or value for important business indicators. You can see things like your net sales by channel or sessions by device type at a glance. For a deeper look, you can click directly from a metric card to its corresponding report. The dashboard also includes a "Live View" page, which shows real-time traffic for your online store, allowing you to watch sales during promotions or busy periods like Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM).

Beyond the dashboard, Shopify provides a range of Reports available from the "Analytics > Reports" page. These reports provide more detailed data about specific metrics or sets of metrics. Each report typically includes a visualization that highlights key data points and a detailed table for additional information. These Shopify-built reports are designed to give you commerce-specific information without extra setup.

The key metrics available across these features generally include:

• Sales Reports: These show how much money your store is making across different channels, allowing you to see total sales, net sales, average order value, and more.
• Customer Reports: Understand your customer base, including new vs. returning customers, customer lifetime value, and repeat purchase rates.
• Marketing Reports: Measure the results of your marketing efforts, tracking sessions by traffic source, conversion rates from different campaigns, and channel performance.
• Behavior Reports: See how visitors interact with your store, including popular products, landing pages, and conversion funnels.

Staff members need specific "Analytics" permissions to access these dashboards and reports for data security and controlled access within your team.

Navigating Your Dashboard and Reports

To access your Shopify Data & Analytics, log in to your Shopify Admin Panel, then click "Analytics" on the left-hand menu. This takes you to the main dashboard. From there, you can choose the specific report or dashboard you want to view.

• Customizing the Dashboard: You can change your main analytics dashboard by dragging, dropping, and rearranging metric cards. This helps you keep your most critical metrics visible, allowing for timely decisions.
• Filtering Reports: Within most reports, you can use filters and date ranges to narrow down the data. This lets you focus on specific periods, channels, or product categories. For example, you can compare sales from the last 30 days to the previous 30 days to spot trends.
• Date Range Comparison: You can also compare your current data against previous periods or the previous year. This helps you understand growth, seasonality, and the impact of changes you've made.
• Exporting Data: For further analysis outside of Shopify, most reports allow you to export the data as a CSV file. This is useful if you need to combine data with other sources or use specialized tools.

Effectively navigating these tools means you can quickly check essential analytics in one place. You can know your sales, understand what it takes for site visitors to become customers (conversion rate), and see your site traffic and where visitors come from (sessions). Understanding these basic elements is important for good ecommerce UX design, as the data often points to areas where user experience can be improved to increase conversions.

Using Shopify Data & Analytics for Business Growth

Data is only useful if you act on it. By regularly reviewing your analytics, you can spot trends, understand customer behavior, and adjust your plans to increase sales and profitability. Businesses that use data to make decisions consistently perform better than those that don't. Here at First Pier, I've seen how a clear understanding of Shopify Data & Analytics can significantly improve a business.

Improving Conversion Rates

A primary goal for any e-commerce business is to get visitors to complete a purchase. Shopify Data & Analytics provides the information you need to identify problems and improve your conversion rate.

• Analyzing the Sales Funnel: Shopify's analytics can show you the typical path customers take through your store, from landing page to checkout. By examining this funnel, you can see where customers drop off. Is it the product page, the cart, or the shipping information step? Identifying these areas is the first step to fixing them.
• Identifying Drop-off Points: For example, if you see a high drop-off rate on product pages, it might indicate issues with product descriptions, images, or pricing. If it's the checkout, perhaps shipping costs are too high or the process is too complex.
• Top Landing Pages: Identify which pages are most effective at attracting and converting visitors. You can then try to replicate the success of these pages or direct more traffic to them.
• Device Type Performance: Analytics shows you how your store performs on different devices (desktop, mobile, tablet). If mobile conversion rates are low, it signals a need for mobile improvements.
• Site Speed Impact: While not directly in Shopify's native analytics, site speed is a critical factor for conversion. Slow loading times frustrate users and often lead to them leaving the site. You can use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to check your speed and then use Shopify data to measure the impact of any improvements.

By using this information, you can make targeted changes to your store. This might involve improving product pages, simplifying the checkout process, or making the site better for mobile users—all areas where expert Shopify development can make a significant difference.

Understanding Customer Behavior

Understanding your customers is necessary for creating personalized experiences and building loyalty. Shopify Data & Analytics shows you who your customers are and how they interact with your brand.

• New vs. Returning Customers: This metric helps you understand your customer acquisition and retention efforts. Are you bringing in enough new customers? Are your existing customers coming back to buy more? A healthy balance is often a sign of sustainable growth.
• Average Order Value (AOV): This tells you the average amount spent per order. Methods like upselling and cross-selling, offering free shipping thresholds, or creating product bundles can increase AOV, directly increasing your revenue without needing more traffic.
• Customer Cohort Analysis: For more advanced users, analyzing customer cohorts (groups of customers who made their first purchase around the same time) helps you see patterns in retention and spending over time.
• Product Affinity: Shopify reports can show which products are frequently bought together. This information is very useful for creating product bundles, cross-sell recommendations, and targeted marketing campaigns.
• Purchase Funnels: Beyond just identifying drop-offs, understanding the full purchase funnel helps you see the customer journey and identify areas to improve the flow.

Information about customer behavior is very useful for creating effective email & SMS marketing campaigns, allowing you to segment your audience and send more relevant messages that lead to repeat purchases and build customer loyalty.

Improving Marketing and Sales Channels

Every dollar you spend on marketing should generate a return. Shopify Data & Analytics helps you see how well your marketing and sales channels are working, helping you allocate your budget wisely.

• Sessions by Source: This report shows where your website traffic is coming from—Google search, social media, email campaigns, direct traffic, etc. It helps you see which channels are bringing awareness and visits.
• Attributing Sales to Channels: Shopify provides reports that attribute sales to specific marketing activities. This helps you understand which campaigns and channels are directly leading to conversions. While Shopify's native attribution is often last-click, it still gives you a good starting point.
• Return on Ad Spend (ROAS): For paid advertising, ROAS is a critical metric. It tells you how much revenue you're generating for every dollar spent on ads. By tracking ROAS within Shopify (or through integrations), you can identify your most profitable ad campaigns.
• Campaign Performance: Organize your marketing activities into "Campaigns" within Shopify to get a combined view of their performance. This helps you understand the overall impact of specific promotions or marketing pushes.
• Top Referrers: See which external websites are sending traffic to your store. This can help you identify valuable partnerships or content opportunities.

Understanding these metrics is fundamental to running successful paid search & SEM campaigns. By knowing which channels perform best, you can adjust your bids, change your targeting, and improve your ad copy to get a better return on your investment.

When to Look Beyond Native Tools: Limitations and Alternatives

While Shopify's built-in analytics are a good starting point, growing businesses often find they need more depth. Understanding these limitations helps you know when it's time to build a more advanced analytics system. As businesses grow, the native reports can become rigid, lacking the ability to integrate with external data sources or perform advanced segmentation.

Key Limitations of Built-in Analytics

Shopify's native tools are designed for general use, but they do have specific limitations that can make detailed analysis difficult for a rapidly growing or complex business:

• 13-Month Data Retention: A significant constraint for long-term trend analysis or year-over-year growth comparisons is that Shopify only stores 13 months of data on most reports unless you manually export or store it elsewhere. This makes it challenging to model customer lifetime value (LTV) or understand multi-year trends.
• Last-Click Attribution Model: Shopify generally uses a last-click attribution model. This means the last marketing touchpoint before a sale gets 100% of the credit. While simple, it doesn't show how different channels work together throughout the customer journey. A Coupler.io study found that Shopify's attribution can misalign with GA4 by 20–30% in many cases, which is a major problem for performance marketers trying to allocate budget.
• Data Discrepancies: It's common to see discrepancies between Shopify's reported sales and those from other platforms like Google Analytics or your ad managers. This can make it difficult to trust a single source of truth.
• Limited Customization: While you can customize dashboards and filter some reports, the ability to create entirely new reports from scratch with complex logic is limited on standard plans.
• Lack of Cross-store Reporting (for non-Plus): If you operate multiple Shopify stores, getting a combined view of all your businesses in one place is not natively supported without a Shopify Plus plan and its Data Warehouse feature.

Here's a quick comparison of native Shopify analytics versus a more advanced analytics stack:

Integrating with Google Analytics 4 (GA4)

Given the limitations of native Shopify analytics and the fact that Universal Analytics properties stopped processing data on July 1, 2023, moving to and integrating with Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is no longer optional—it's essential.

• Why GA4 is essential: GA4 is Google's current analytics tool. It uses an event-based data model, which offers a more complete understanding of user journeys compared to Universal Analytics' session-based model. This means every user interaction, from page views to clicks to purchases, is treated as an event, providing a more detailed data set for analysis. GA4 also offers better cross-device and cross-platform tracking, which is important because customers often use multiple devices.
• Event-based vs. Session-based model: Universal Analytics focused on sessions and page views. GA4, on the other hand, focuses on events and users. This shift allows for more flexible and detailed tracking of specific user actions and behaviors, giving you more detailed information about conversion paths.
• Setting up GA4 on Shopify: Shopify makes the basic integration process fairly direct. You can usually go to your Shopify Admin > Online Store > Preferences > Analytics and enter your GA4 property ID. However, for full e-commerce tracking and to push all relevant purchase event parameters, you might need to implement a data layer and use Google Tag Manager (GTM) or the GTAG method, especially for advanced tracking beyond the default.
• Using the Google & YouTube channel app: This app can help simplify the connection between your Shopify store and Google services, including GA4. It simplifies the setup process for GA4 tags.
• Cross-domain tracking: If your customer journey involves multiple domains (e.g., a main store and a separate blog or checkout domain), GA4 is designed to handle cross-domain tracking more effectively, providing a unified view of the user.

To start, you need to sign up for Google Analytics and create a GA4 property. Once set up, you can connect it to your Shopify store. This integration is crucial for detailed analysis of user behavior, improving your marketing plans, and ensuring you have continuous data tracking for your business.

Advanced Data Analysis with ShopifyQL and APIs

For merchants who need to answer highly specific questions about their business, Shopify provides more technical tools for direct data access and custom analysis. These options go beyond the standard reports and dashboards, allowing for custom analysis.

Introduction to ShopifyQL

When standard reports are not enough, ShopifyQL can help.

• What is ShopifyQL: ShopifyQL is Shopify's query language built specifically for commerce. It's designed to query merchant store data and help you build custom analytics and reporting tools. Think of it like a specialized SQL (Structured Query Language) for your Shopify data.
• Commerce-specific query language: ShopifyQL understands e-commerce concepts directly, allowing you to ask questions about sales, orders, customers, and products using familiar terminology. You can use it to filter, aggregate, and visualize your data in ways that native reports cannot.
• Creating custom reports: With ShopifyQL, you can modify pre-built reports or create entirely new ones from scratch. You can add metrics and dimensions to get more specific reports, focusing on the exact data you're looking for. The built-in query editor, found in your Shopify admin, allows you to write these queries directly. If you're not comfortable with coding, Shopify's AI assistant, Sidekick, can even help write the queries for you.
• Example query for sales by region: Imagine you want to see your net sales broken down by billing country for the last quarter. A simplified ShopifyQL query might look something like this:

  FROM salesSHOW net_salesGROUP BY billing_countrySINCE -3 monthsUNTIL todayORDER BY net_sales DESC

  This query would give you a list of countries and the net sales generated from each, ordered from highest to lowest. The ShopifyQL syntax reference provides a complete guide to all the keywords, operators, and functions you can use.

Using APIs for a Comprehensive Data View

For the most control and integration, Shopify offers flexible Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).

• Admin API and GraphQL: Shopify's Admin API allows you to programmatically access and manipulate your store's data. It supports both REST and GraphQL. GraphQL, in particular, lets you request exactly the data you need, making it efficient for fetching specific data points for analysis.
• Connecting to a Data Warehouse: For businesses with significant data needs, especially Shopify Plus merchants, connecting to a data warehouse is a major improvement. The Shopify Data Warehouse service (available for eligible Shopify Plus stores) provides access to your analytical data models across all your stores in a single SQL database. This means you can pull all your Shopify data into a centralized location.
• Combining Shopify data with other business data (e.g., ERP, CRM): Once your Shopify data is in a data warehouse, you can combine it with information from other systems like your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform, marketing automation tools, or even offline sales data. This creates a unified view of your entire business, allowing for complete reporting and advanced analytics that include all parts of the customer's experience. This is where Shopify Plus optimization is especially useful for creating complex data plans.

By using APIs and a data warehouse, you can build custom dashboards, apply advanced attribution models, perform predictive analytics (like inventory forecasting or customer LTV modeling), and get a complete understanding of your business performance. This level of data integration moves you from understanding basic store metrics to making sophisticated, data-backed business decisions.

Frequently Asked Questions about Shopify Analytics

I often get asked specific questions about how to use Shopify Data & Analytics. Here are some common ones.

How do I track my store's real-time performance?

Shopify's Live View feature shows you a world map of visitor activity, active carts, and sales as they happen. It's especially useful for monitoring flash sales or high-traffic events like Black Friday. You can see how many visitors are on your site, which pages they're viewing, and where they are geographically. This real-time feed helps you see the immediate results of marketing campaigns or promotions.

What are the essential technical skills for using Shopify's analytics?

The skills needed depend on the type of analysis you want to do:

• Basic Dashboard and Reports: The standard dashboard and reports are click-based and do not require technical skills. You just need to understand what the metrics mean.
• Custom Reports and Filtering: If you want to modify pre-built reports, apply various filters, or create custom metric cards, you'll benefit from a good understanding of data dimensions and how to combine them. This is more about logical thinking than coding.
• Advanced Analysis with ShopifyQL or APIs: To write custom queries using ShopifyQL or to pull data via Shopify's APIs, you'll need familiarity with query languages (like SQL or GraphQL concepts) and potentially some programming knowledge (e.g., Python for API calls). This is typically for developers or data analysts.

How can I compare my store's performance to others?

Shopify offers a benchmarking feature that allows you to compare your store's data against aggregated data from similar businesses on the platform. This is available within certain Shopify reports (typically on Shopify and Advanced Shopify plans). It helps you understand where your key metrics stand relative to your peers, giving you context on areas where you might be doing well or where there's room for improvement. For example, you might see how your conversion rate compares to the average for stores in your niche.

Turning Data into Action

Using your Shopify Data & Analytics effectively is a continuous process of asking questions, finding answers in the data, and taking action. Start with the native tools to understand the basics of your business. As you grow, you can adopt more advanced tools and integrations to get more detailed information. A clear data plan is necessary for a growing and profitable e-commerce business. Here at First Pier, we help merchants build data systems to support their growth.

Ready to build a data plan that works? Explore our e-commerce data and analytics solutions.