If you have an online store, you want to know how well it is doing. Shopify has some basic reporting, but there are other reporting tools that can provide you with better analytics. My favorite is Google Analytics, which is a free tool.
Adding Google Analytics to your Shopify store
Shopify has built-in support for Google Analytics, so getting it installed is easy. In your Shopify store admin, go to Setting / Online Store. There you will see a Google Analytics section. And there are links to instructions about setting up a Google Analytics account if you do not have one yet. Follow the instructions here and get Google Analytics working on your site.
Your First Scorecard
Once you have Google Analytics implemented in your Shopify store, the next step is to create your scorecard. To do that you'll need to go to Google Analytics and log into your account.
This first scorecard is meant to be a high-level look at your store. As you build your business and your store, you'll want to get deeper into Google Analytics. But for this first scorecard, we're keeping it very simple. The scorecard uses the basic metrics that are tracked by implementing Google Analytics in Shopify. No further setup of Google Analytics' more advanced features is needed.
The basic scorecard looks like this:
The left column is the User Funnel. The User Funnel shows you how customers are navigating your store and moving down the funnel to your ultimate goal of making purchases. This is measured at the User level not at the Visit level as people (Users) are customers. This way, the 1000 visits to your site from your mom will only count as one user and not skew your scorecard.
The middle column tells where your users came from and where they went on your site.
The right column shows the user traffic over time and what countries your users came from.
Creating Your First Scorecard
I placed this scorecard in the Google Analytics Solutions Gallery. You can see it at https://www.google.com/analytics/gallery/#posts/search/%3F_.viewId%3DGuvzJ_1fSkybCkA3nXOjmA and use it for your site.
And here are the details of the scorecard if you want to build it out yourself.
I put this scorecard in the Dashboards section of Google Analytics. Here are the details of the widgets in the scorecard so you can see how they are set up.
Left Column
The left column is known as the User Funnel.
Remember to be focused on users as your main way of measuring your store's performance. Google Analytics' users are the closest measure of real customers.
I care more about a repeat user metric here than I do a new user metric, but Google Analytics does not show a repeat user metric. So you'll need to do a little mental math to come up with your repeat user metric. As you are doing that mental math, think of it as a percentage. For example, 26% of the users were repeat users.
As you continue down the funnel, continue to do the mental math to calculate percentages. For example, 53% of users viewed a product detail page.
This of course is a key metric - its how many people purchased something in your Shopify store. This is called the bottom of the funnel.
Middle Column
This widget shows where your users came from. This is a great way to verify if your marketing efforts are working.
This widget shows which pages are the most viewed in your store. This will give you a quick way to see what is popular and how users are navigating.
Right Column
Getting Your Scorecard Mailed to You
Now that your scorecard is set up, you should have Google Analytics automatically email it to you. To start, looking at the scorecard once a week is a good frequency. So have it emailed to you each week. Setting up regular emails is done through the email link at the top of your Scorecard.
Using Your Scorecard
If you are like most online store owners, you wear many hats -- you always have a to-do list that is longer than you can ever finish. This simple scorecard is meant to help you help manage your time. Because it doesn't go into a lot of detail, you can quickly review it, take away some insights and get onto your other tasks. Here's an example. Let's say that one week you are spending a lot of time promoting your store on Twitter. To measure the impact of that, you can look at the Sources widget. If you don't see an increase in referral traffic from Twitter, then you probably shouldn't be spending so much effort on that channel. If a store is run by a team thousands, they'll spend a lot more time doing analysis on their Twitter efforts and testing out different alternatives. But a smaller store doesn't have the time for that. With the simple scorecard, you'll see the result of efforts in broad strokes and be able to come to some conclusions on what's working and what is not. If Twitter didn't work well that week, then try Facebook next week.