The Podcast
Video
Show Links
- Adding GA4 Tracking to your Shopify Store - https://jadepuma.com/blogs/the-shopify-solutions-podcast/episode-102-adding-google-analytics-4-to-your-shopify-store
- GA4 Implementation Checklist - https://jadepuma.com/blogs/blog/ga4-implementation-checklist-for-shopify
- Google Looker Studio - https://lookerstudio.google.com/
- Shopify Weekly Scorecard Template - https://jadepuma.com/weekly-scorecard
- Shopify Monthly Scorecard Template - https://jadepuma.com/monthly-scorecard
Help the Podcast
Transcript
Hey, Scott Austin here.
In this episode we're going to talk about how to get a regular scorecard from Google Analytics for your Shopify store. I covered this before in Episode 16 of the podcast, but alot has changed in Google Analytics since then. So here's the way to get a scorecard today.
Let me first take a step back and talk about the importance of data. Data about your store and about your business is really important to make informed decisions. I'm always impressed about how much savvy store owners understand about their customers. They know what they're looking at, they know how they navigate on their site, they know the thought process that goes through their customer's minds when making purchase decisions. Now, Shopify comes with its own reporting tool, but I rarely use it. I prefer to use Google analytics instead, otherwise known as GA. It's a free analytics tool from Google that provides what's more depth and insight than the Shopify reporting tool. It's also used by most websites on the internet, not just Shopify stores. Here's some of the reasons that I prefer to use GA over Shopify reports.
- The first is that GA gives more information, a ton more information than you can get out of Shopify reports.
- The second is that it can be customized much more so you can set up reports the way that you want to see them and the frequency that you want to see them, which is what this podcast is going to be about.
- Third, GA allows you to include other sites and apps that are a part of your business beyond your Shopify store. So if you also have a WordPress site, you can have one Google analytics instance measure the same customers across your WordPress site and your Shopify store. Or if you have more than one Shopify store, Google analytics can consolidate the data from your multiple Shopify stores if that's what you want.
- And number four, Google analytics integrates with search console and Google ad words. So if you're doing any SEO or SEM, Google analytics data will be essential for those operations.
Let me show you the scorecards we're going to make.
Now those of you that are listening to this audio only version of the podcast, there's an accompanying video that you can watch where I'm going to walk through the scorecard and some details about it.
And the scorecard I have in front of me is the monthly scorecard. I also do a weekly scorecard that I'll show you how to do here.
And the metrics for the monthly and the weekly scorecard are the same. We're just looking at different timeframes. And in the monthly scorecard we compare the data to the same month the previous year. and in the weekly scorecard we compare the data to the previous week's data.
So let's look at the monthly scorecard and see the metrics we're looking at. And the first one is a timeline of the users. You can see over the period of the month how many users have come to the website. And then I like to look at a user funnel versus a session based funnel. So what I'm looking at and all the metrics in my funnel is number of users.
So if one user comes to the website 20 times in the month, they only show up one time in the user view versus a session view, they show up 20 times. And the funnel that I like to look at is the total number of users to the site. The number of users that are new users, users that are getting to the product pages in your Shopify store, the number of users adding to the cart, the number of users starting the checkout, and the number of users that are purchasing and completing that checkout process.
I also look at the total revenue made by the store in that month, and then the average order value. And then for each one of those metrics, we're showing a percentage of the total. So you can actually calculate a conversion rate that way. And then I also have tables in the scorecard to show you where your traffic came from.
There's the session source and the session medium. We also have a table for the country that people are coming from. And the breakdown of mobile versus desktop versus tablet. And finally, we show the landing pages by the number of views of each of the pages. And what's really nice about this report. And we'll get into the details of how it's made a little later in the episode, is that
you can click on one part of the scorecard, and it'll update the data for the rest of it. And here's what I mean.
Let's say I want to look at the traffic coming from youtube.com. I can select that under mice sources and then all the other data in the scorecard updates with that information. So now in the landing page report I can see the landing pages that the YouTube traffic is landing on. I can see the countries of my YouTube traffic.
I can see the desktop versus mobile breakdown and the whole user funnel for YouTube.
Or I could do the same thing for my klaviyo traffic.
And then I could also do it if I wanted to look at, well, what is my CPC traffic doing? I could select that under medium, and then you could see the total number of users the user funnel for your CPC. And once again, the landing pages that they're landing on, country breakdowns, all that good information. So the interactivity of this report is super helpful in letting you triangulate and understand the behavior of your customers better.
And a real example of that is I'm looking at my CPC report, and I did a CPC campaign earlier in the month, and it was the first one I ever done for Jade Puma. And what I found was a lot of my traffic, you know, was coming from not the United States. and a lot of it from India, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Nepal, Algeria, Pakistan, Iraq, Morocco.
I've never had a client from any one of those countries. So that made me realize that I needed to change my campaign and target the countries where my clients are coming from, like Australia, Canada, United States, United Kingdom and Europe.
But if I had not seen this report, I would not have been able to figure out that my ad spend was going towards countries that really weren't going to return for me.
So I'm a big fan of the interactivity of this report because it helps you accelerate your learning curve to understand your customers better. And then in the weekly scorecard, we're doing the same metrics. But like I said before, we're just comparing week over week. what the change is for each of the metrics versus, week over year like we do in the month report.
Now, because Kia has so much data in it. It's not the easiest tool to use. There's definitely a steep learning curve behind it.
So in this podcast I'm going to give you these two scorecards that you can use today in your business in your Shopify store.
This is meant to fast track you into getting useful metrics from GA and wrap your head around what Google Analytics is capable of providing.
now. This podcast is going to be pretty hands on with some detailed instructions on creating reports. So if you're listening to this in your car, go ahead and listen through.
Just know that you'll want to sit down with these instructions at a later date. While you're in front of your computer.
So I'm assuming you've already added Ga4 tracking to your Shopify store, as it's part of the Google and YouTube sales channel that every store should have. We covered it back in episode 102 of the podcast.
Which I've included a link to in the show notes. If you haven't taken this step yet.
Next, you want to optimize your GA configuration for e-commerce.
I've included a link in the show notes. Just some detailed instructions you can follow on how to do that.
Now let's move on to how to create your scorecards.
So the data for our scorecard is coming from Google Analytics. But the tool we're using to present that scorecard is called Looker Studio. And Looker Studio is another free Google tool. So the first thing you're going to want to do is to go to Looker Studio. There's a link to it in the show notes and create an account if you don't already have one, and you'll want to do that with the same email address you use for Google Analytics.
And then you're going to want to go under data sources and add a data source for Google Analytics. And if you use that same email address, it should automatically show you when it brings up the list of Google Analytics accounts that you have access to. You can pick your store from that list, and you might not have a lot on your list.
I have hundreds of them on my list with all my clients, but you should be able to quickly find your store or stores and add those Google Analytics feeds as data sources to your Looker studio.
So once you have your Looker Studio account created, and you've added your data sources for Google Analytics to Looker Studio, you're going to want to click two more links in the show notes and that is for the templates for the Weekly scorecard and the monthly scorecard. So if you click on the template for the weekly scorecard, it'll open up in Looker Studio, the template that I've created.
And I'm sharing out that anybody can access.
And then what you're going to do is make a copy of it. And you can do that in the upper right hand corner. There's three little ellipses in a circle. You click on that and it says make a copy.
So you click make a copy. And then it's going to ask you what new data source do you want to use for that copy. And that's where you're going to select that menu. And you're going to see in that menu the data source for your Google Analytics that you just added to Looker Studio a couple steps ago. So you'll add that to it.
And then this copy will be in your looker studio. And then you'll do the same thing for the monthly scorecard template. You'll click the link in the show notes. Add that in by making a copy and assigning it to your data source for your GA. For instance, for your Shopify store.
Then what you'll have is two scorecards the monthly scorecard and the weekly scorecard in your looker studio.
And the first time you create those and every time you load them up, it'll take a second for all the data to populate inside the scorecard, because it's pulling a lot of data from your Google Analytics. And it's calculating all like all these percentages, was doing a lot of math. And it'll take a second or two or some, you know, sometimes 10 or 15 seconds to load up all the data elements. And that's totally normal.
So what I like to do with these scorecards is to set them up, to be sent to me automatically through email, every week and every month. So they don't have to come looking for the data. It just shows up in my inbox. So the way we do that is we go over to the share section in the upper right and we schedule delivery now for the weekly scorecard.
What I do is I set it up to go out every Monday, at 8 a.m. local time, and you could add yourself and other people to this, email schedule.
then once you have that schedule set up every Monday morning, you come into the office, they'll be your scorecard in your inbox that you can look at, and that'll be a PDF that you can click on.
And then it'll if you want, you can go into Looker Studio to engage that, interactivity that I talked about before. And then for the monthly scorecard, do the same thing, go over the share button, schedule delivery. And I set this up to go at the first day of the month. Each month.
So that's the steps you're going to have to follow to get these scorecards set up and working for your store.
it's really not that hard if you already have Google Analytics in place. If you don't have it in place, that's a bit of a process. There's some documentation here for you to follow.
if you haven't optimized your Google Analytics for e-commerce before, there's also some documentation in the show notes for that. But if those are already done, it's just a matter of basically going creating a looker studio account, adding your Google Analytics data feed to that account, and then copying the templates that I've provided and adding your data to those templates instead of the data that I've got in place there.
And then you're off to the races and you'll have these rich, interactive scorecards so you can regularly measure the performance of your store. Now these reports, once you've copied them, they're in your looker studio and you can completely customize them and change them any way that you want. In Looker Studio. It's a super rich tool. I absolutely love getting in there and customizing the reports and adding to them and that kind of stuff.
So these templates aren't locked for you. You own the template now. You can edit it. You can add things, remove things, and change them around as you desire. Now if you ever like, make a mistake and go too far, just go back to the original templates that I created and share it out and create new instances for you.
And you can start all over again and customize them the way you want. That's it for this episode. I hope you start looking at this rich data and hope it makes you smarter about your business.
Thanks for listening.