Web analytics play a crucial role in helping Shopify merchants effectively sell to their customers. Understanding what metrics are available to you and what they can be used for is a great step to take on your journey to improving your shop’s conversion rate. The below sections are broken into two sections, dimensions, or attributes that relate to a unique visit, and metrics which measure what occured during their visit.
Metrics:
Abandoned Cart Rate
Abandoned cart rate measures the number of customers who added a product to their cart but never completed their checkout. A high abandoned cart rate might be indicative of a hard to find cart button or not presenting a view cart button directly after a customer adds to cart. To improve abandoned cart rate look at all the steps a customer might take from the time they add a product to cart to the time they start the checkout process.
Abandoned Carts
Abandoned carts are the raw number of customers who added a product to their cart and did not checkout. This number may be used to tie back to a lost cart email campaign to determine the effectiveness of the email over time.
Abandoned Checkout Rate
Abandoned checkout rate calculates the number of customers who started the shopify checkout process without placing an order. Seeing a spike in an abandoned checkout rate might be a sign that a button is broken on your form, or an unexpected shipping charge was added. Experimenting with different payment methods, shipping discounts, or “free” products at checkout can help to improve your abandoned checkout rate.
Abandoned Checkouts
Abandoned checkouts are the number of visitors who started the checkout process and did not complete the order. These are the customers with the highest intent to purchase that haven’t yet bought. A good retargeting campaign might work well for these visitors.
Add to Cart Rate
Add to cart rate is a calculation of the number of visitors who added a product to their cart. While monitoring this metric, you can make changes to your site that make it easier for a shopper to add a product to their cart. Changes might include an add to cart button from the list page, adding a featured product section on the home page & much more. This metric is a great barometer to measure funnel performance on an ongoing basis.
Average Order Value
Average order value is the sum of all merchandise revenue (non-tax or shipping) divided by the number of orders placed. AOV (average order value) is a key performance metric for any site and can be improved by recommending compatible products, giving bulk discounts, or implementing a free shipping threshold. This metric is one of our “big 3” when analyzing a categories performance over time, a drop in AOV usually coincides with a drop in revenue.
Average Session Duration
Average session duration is a niche metric that sums the amount of time a visitor spends navigating your site, divided by the number of visitors. While there are better metrics to determine this, a short session duration might indicate a customer got frustrated and left meaning a button on your home page may be broken. A longer session duration may mean shoppers have decision fatigue from too many options, or they have to navigate to many different pages to find what they’re looking for.
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is the measurement of bounces to visitors. How many users came to my site and left after seeing one page. Bounce rate is a critical metric for determining landing page success. For instance, let’s say you make a change to the homepage hero image and the bounce rate goes up, that means that the new image that was added deterred more customers from wanting to learn more about your products than the last image. Bounce rate can also be used in conjunction with marketing campaign to determine if the ad copy aligns to the landing page offer, if they don’t align you can expect a higher bounce rate.
Bounces
Bounces are the number of customers who landed on your site and only visited one page. These customers may have come to your site by accident, or determined that they weren’t interested from the page they landed on.
Cart Additions
Cart additions are the number of times a shopper adds a product to their cart. One visitor can have many cart additions during their session.
Cart Removals
Cart removals are the number of times a shopper removes a product from their cart. Products with a lot of cart removals might have a high shipping cost that was not visible prior to adding to cart.
Carts
Carts are the number of visitors who have added at least one product to their cart. A popular funnel metric when combined with visits and orders.
Checkouts Started
Checkouts started counts the number of visitors that have started the checkout process. One visitor can only have one checkout started per session.
Collection Views
Collection views keeps track of the visits to a collection page. This combined with other metrics can help determine the success of a collection.
Conversion Rate
Conversion rate (CVR) is the calculation of visitors who placed an order divided by the number of visits. One of our “big 3” metrics, CVR is used everywhere on an ecommerce site, from a marketing campaign to the redesign of the product detail page CVR will determine the success of the changes. Measuring conversion rate is done universally across all ecommerce sites and should be a topic of conversation weekly, if not daily.
Entries
Entries track the number of times a page was the first page visited during a session. The page with the highest number of entries will typically be the homepage, but can also be landing pages, or blog posts that rank high organically.
Exits
Exits tracks the last page a visitor was on during their session. Hopefully your top exits page is the successful order has been placed, but if not, exits can give clues about which pages customers fell out of the funnel on.
Orders
Orders are the number of unique order IDs that have been created during a period of time from visitors of your online shop. Orders are important, but the number alone might not be very productive in finding opportunities for improvement on your site.
Page Views
Page views track the number of visitors that have seen a given page. This might be of interest for pages that don’t follow the traditional funnel like a newsletter signup page to compare against signups.
Percent to Product Detail Page (PDP)
Percent to PDP calculates the number of visitors who made it to a product detail page during their visit. Percent to PDP is a good performance metric to track over time and compare different marketing campaigns, collection pages, and device types to see where improvements can be made to get more visitors to view a product.
Product Views
Similar to page views, product views tracks the number of visitors that have viewed a product. This might be helpful in determining which products or categories have been seen the most by customers.
Revenue
Revenue is the sum of all merchandise revenue (non-tax or shipping) denominated in the shop’s currency. Revenue can be compared across time frame with all dimensions listed below to determine where a spike or a lull in revenue has occurred from.
Revenue per Visit
Revenue per visit is the sum of all merchandise revenue divided by the number of visitors. Revenue per visit is the ultimate performance metric to track when trying to make improvements to conversion rate and average order value, the combination of both will result in a higher revenue per visit.
Searches
Searches are the number of times a visitor enters a search query into the search bar. This combined with the search term metric will give you your top searched terms. Try adding percent to PDP to see if your customers are finding the products they want when using the search bar.
Units
Units tracks the number of units sold across all orders. If a customer buys 2 red t-shirts and 1 blue shirt the number of units purchased was 3 for that order. Units can be important to track if your customers typically buy more than one at a time. Certain measures can be taken to increase the amount of units sold like bulk discounting.
Visits
Visits are the number of unique sessions that are created by a visitor. A session is defined as a 12 hour period from the first page visit. Visits, the third of our “big 3” metrics is a critical part in understanding where your customers are coming from. When noticing a spike or lull in visits it’s critical to know where the change occurred to know how to fix the issue or lean into the new found customers.
Dimensions:
Browser
Browser shows which web browser your customers are visiting on. This may be chrome, safari, edge, and so on. Checking conversion metrics by browser might uncover an issue certain browsers are having with a new checkout page.
Country
Country uses a customers IP address to determine what country they are visiting from. This can be a good starting place when comparing marketing campaign performance by region.
Day
Day represents the calendar day that the visit took place. The time zone is based on the default time zone of the ecommerce shop. Day can be used to track revenue over a given time period.
Device
Device determines if the visitor was using a mobile, tablet or a desktop device when visiting your site. Conversion rates might be dramatically different across devices and certain content might not be mobile friendly and vise versa, it’s important to track metrics across device types when making changes to your site.
Hour
Hour displays the hour of the day, 1-24, that a given metric occured on. Hour can be used to determine what hour of the day is the busiest for the site over a given period of time. It can also help pin down when a spike occurred, maybe a post on social media went viral and revenue spiked at 8pm, hour would be a useful dimension in determining that.
Marketing Campaign
Marketing campaign determines the utm_campaign value that a visitor entered your site on.
Marketing Content
Marketing content determines the utm_content value that a visitor entered your site on.
Marketing Medium
Marketing medium determines the utm_medium value that a visitor entered your site on.
Marketing Source
Marketing source determines the utm_source value that a visitor entered your site on.
Month
Month tracks the month a session occurred in. When looking at multiple years month combines all like months into one value. Month would be a good dimension to use when tracking progress of a metric over the year or quarter.
Operating System
Operating system displays the system the visitors device is operating on. This value can be windows, macOS, linux, iOS, or android. Certain operating systems may convert higher than others and might provide clues about a high converting shopping segment.
Page Name
Page name is the title of the page that a shopper visits. This dimension combined with bounce rate or exits might give clues about pages that customers are exiting the funnel on. Page name can also be used to track visits to non-shoppable pages like contact forms or blogs.
Product
Product is the product handle of a given product. Most metrics can be tied directly to products like orders and revenue but also add to cart rate. A lower add to cart rate for a product might be a sign to refresh the content on the product page.
Product Category
Product category is the high level grouping that a product falls into. If you sell across multiple product categories this is a great starting point to monitor key metrics week over week. A drop in revenue across one product category would signal to dive deeper and layer in other dimensions to try and find the reason for the drop off.
Search Term
Search term is the term typed into the search bar. This dimension combined with the searches and percent to PDP metrics can help determine if your customers are finding what their looking for or unlock new product expansion ideas if they’re not sold currently.
State
State is the state or providence the user has visited from based on their IP address. If you sell winter coats and you notice a spike in sales, state might give clues as to why if there was a winter storm in the northeast.
Variant
Variant is the name of the product variant that is visited or purchased. Variants can have their own conversion and add to cart rates that might offer insights into how content is presented for the variants.
Vendor
Vendor displays the vendor of record on a given product. Your store might source products from different vendors and grouping them to track key metrics might be useful to know for how to optimize offers or homepage content.