Google Analytics is a great, free website analytics system. Shopify even has a built-in integration with them so you can get it working with very little effort.
But if that's all you use for analytics, you could be missing out on a lot.
11%
That's what Quantable found when it studied how many people were blocking the Google Analytics JavaScript in the first half of 2016.
11% of your traffic and potential customers are invisible to Google Analytics.
And I bet it's increased since then.
Metrics should be used to help you make decisions.
They are almost never exact but if they are close enough then you can use them as guideposts in your decision making.
But with over a tenth of your customers not getting tracked, you need to be careful using just Google Analytics.
What if the majority of your sales occurred in that 11%?
Shopify has some decent metrics systems that you can use to double check everything.
My recommendation is to use Google Analytics but take what it says with a grain of salt. Trust in your higher value metrics that you can track really well:
- number of customers purchased
- order totals
- mailing list signups
These are harder metrics that can't be blocked by customers. They are all really interesting to slice, dice, and segment too.
One problem though, as your store grows it can become more difficult to get a handle on all of the order data.
Repeat Customer Insights can help with that by aggregating your customer orders into a powerful report called a Customer Purchase Latency analysis. Basically, it tells you how often customers are buying, how much they are spending, and highlights areas you can improve.
Install Repeat Customer Insights and get a better handle on your order metrics
Eric Davis
Learn which products build the best customers
Find which products create the most valuable customers with the First Product Analysis in Repeat Customer Insights. It goes beyond your best sellers by looking at long-term purchasing and retention behavior of your customers.