Shopify’s analytics dashboards are instrumental in identifying customer purchasing behavior and extracting insights that facilitate data-driven marketing decisions. A standard Shopify dashboard monitors business outcomes across several key performance indicators (KPIs), including sales, orders, refunds, and more. At Versich, we have advanced this concept by creating our tailored set of custom Shopify KPI dashboards using Power BI. These dashboards provide unique insights into customer actions, such as:
Customer Lifetime Value and its progress over time
Frequently co-purchased items
Peak shopping times of the day
The most commonly used discount codes
Return frequency and product reorders
Average intervals between purchases
Trends among new versus returning customers
We're excited to offer our custom Shopify dashboard template at no cost to every e-commerce store. In this article, we will guide you through the insights you can leverage from our dashboards and how to maximize their potential. Let's explore!
Understanding Shopify Analytics Dashboard
What comes to mind when you think of a “Shopify analytics dashboard”? For many, it’s the default analytics reports found in Shopify’s reporting section.
To help clarify, it’s essential to note that Shopify continuously tracks various signals, including traffic patterns, product views, conversion rates, sales by channel, returning customer metrics, average order value, and more. Their built-in dashboards compile these signals, enabling you to analyze them by time frames, sales channels, devices, or customer behaviors.
Although the data from Shopify's default dashboards is beneficial, the presentation of this data can be restrictive and often fails to provide a complete picture. Our Shopify reporting template, created in Power BI, resolves this limitation, making it simple to develop custom analytics that align with your specific business needs.
It's crucial to manage expectations and clarify the absence of certain data in Shopify dashboards. Shopify's focus is predominantly on online store activities, not encompassing the broader marketing funnel that includes ad platforms, awareness channels, or upper-funnel initiatives. For those looking to integrate marketing data into the Shopify dashboard, Versich’s e-commerce analytics consultants are available to assist.
Four Shopify Analytics Dashboards Available in Our Template
Our Power BI template comprises four primary Shopify analytics dashboards:
Shopify Sales Dashboard: Monitors store performance through metrics such as sales, discounts, average order value (AOV), cost of goods sold (COGS), and units sold.
Shopify Order Time Dashboard: Analyzes sales, customer counts, and AOV by specific hours of the day and days of the week.
Shopify Customer Dashboard: Showcases both new and returning customers, average orders per customer, reorder rates, and customer lifetime value (LTV).
Shopify Product Dashboard: Displays sales performance by product, product-specific reorder rates, product pair purchases, and gross profit per item.
Shopify Sales Dashboard
The Shopify Sales Dashboard allows brand owners to monitor sales performance over time and to identify significant trends in store activities. It emphasizes critical sales metrics such as Gross Sales, Discounts, Shipping Charges, Sales Tax, AOV, and units sold.
A line chart at the top illustrates your selected metric, whether it be daily, weekly, or monthly. You can toggle through KPIs, including the number of customers, gross sales, COGS, gross profit margin, orders, average order value, and units sold, with options to view these metrics over different time spans.
The corresponding table below delineates sales data by product, detailing the number of units sold. Users have the option to expand any product to analyze performance on a variant level.
A map visually represents gross sales by billing address. Selecting any state filters all other visuals on the dashboard to reflect that region's data.
Finally, the bottom-right table illustrates the distribution of orders by discount code, streamlining the evaluation of your promotional effectiveness.
Shopify Order Time Dashboard
The Shopify Order Time Dashboard reveals the timings of purchases made by customers. It breaks down sales, AOV, and customer numbers by both day of the week and the hour of the day, aiding in the identification of distinct shopping behaviors.
A toggle at the top allows users to adjust the displayed metric across all visuals, whether that be AOV, number of customers, or gross sales.
The histogram in the top-right illustrates the selected metric by weekday. For instance, statistics may show that Monday and Friday are the most active shopping days, indicating that marketing emails may be best timed for these periods.
Another histogram below depicting the metric by hour of the day uncovers peak shopping hours. This insight can guide your Facebook Ads scheduling to optimize engagement during high-traffic times.
The heatmap-style table on the right combines both weekday and hours, with darker shades indicating stronger performance. At a glance, you can spot:
Peak shopping hours when customer activity peaks
Slower periods indicate dips in sales
Unusual trends, such as nighttime activity or weekend spikes in purchases
Shopify Customer Dashboard
The Shopify Customers Dashboard offers detailed insights into customer behavior, illustrating customer retention rates, spending over their lifetime, and the growth of their lifetime value (LTV).
The analysis begins with a comparison between new and returning customers, along with their sales figures and AOV.
A line chart tracks the percentage of returning customers every month, allowing you to assess how effectively new customers transition into repeat purchasers.
This section also reveals the average number of orders placed per customer. For example, as shown in the chart, 47,000 customers made a single order, while 13,000 customers placed two orders, and so forth.
A bar chart on the right illustrates the number of days it takes for customers to place their second, third, and subsequent orders. Utilizing this data can help refine customer reactivation strategies across social media and email initiatives.
The dashboard then shifts focus to customer lifetime value. A line chart displays the average LTV growth over the years, essential for strategizing customer acquisition costs to ensure LTV surpasses acquisition outlays.
Lastly, a cohort analysis table categorizes customers by their first order month and monitors their average LTV over time. This analysis showcases how long it takes before each customer cohort becomes profitable. For example:
Customers who first purchased in July 2024 started with an average LTV of $153, gradually increasing in later months.
Those acquired in February began with an LTV of $180, which nearly doubled after nine months.
Finally, a table displays average customer LTV by state, allowing you to pinpoint regions where customers reflect above-average LTV, enabling targeted marketing efforts for optimized long-term returns.
Shopify Product Dashboard
The Shopify Product Dashboard enables you to assess the performance of every item in your inventory. It keeps track of reorder frequencies, product profitability, and sales trends over time, in addition to highlighting which products are often bought in tandem.
At the top, a table outlines how many customers purchased each product, the reorder rate for those customers, and the average days between repetitions of purchase. This insight can assist in formulating new product strategies; for instance, should a product showcase high reorder rates, you might encourage customers to buy in bulk, enhancing AOV, or integrate these products into reactivation campaigns.
Selecting any product in the table updates the line chart below, permitting the observation of monthly order trends for that particular item, facilitating the identification of patterns and seasonal demand.
Finally, the bottom table lists frequently co-purchased product pairs. This knowledge can be leveraged to construct targeted marketing campaigns or create product bundles to promote to visitors, assisting in boosting overall sales and average order value.
Constraints of the Shopify Analytics Dashboard
As outlined, our Shopify Analytics Dashboard offers a plethora of valuable insights. Nevertheless, raw numbers may sometimes lack context. As a business owner, it is crucial to compare customer lifetime value (LTV) against customer acquisition costs to make well-informed choices.
To enhance this, connecting your marketing data from platforms like Facebook Ads, Google Ads, and Google Analytics to our Shopify dashboard template is highly recommended. This integration provides comprehensive insights into your marketing performance, offering a complete overview of your marketing funnel.
Our marketing analytics consultants are experienced in working with these data sources. We have delivered similar insights for over 600 companies, including Teleperformance and DS Smith.
Connecting Shopify Data to Your Dashboard
To link your data, initiate your complimentary trial for the Shopify Power BI connector. This connector automates data extraction from Shopify into Power BI and adapts it into a convenient format for analysis.
Once connected, all the visualizations discussed above will be populated with your real-time data.
