Shopify performance overview
Most social media analytics are limited to social media metrics, which doesn’t tell direct-to-consumer marketers how well their products are selling. With the Shopify integration as one of Buffer's analytics tools, you now have your Shopify and social media data in a single dashboard. This allows you to create modern visual reports for both Shopify and social media metrics.
The Overview tab for Shopify provides insight into the health of your store, as well as your top referrals and top products.
⭐️ This feature is on our paid plans. Looking for basic analytics?
🎥 Learn more about your analytics in this video.
In this article:
- Finding your report
- Filtering your report
- Diving into your report
- Adding tables and charts to a custom report
- What's next for Shopify in Buffer?
Finding your report
- Start by clicking Analyze at the top of your Buffer dashboard (not available on mobile).
- Select the Shopify on the left-hand side of your dashboard.
Filtering your report
Select the date range you'd like to analyze at the top.
📝 One Shopify account can be connected to Buffer at a time.
Diving into your report
Health
The health summary gives you a quick overview of how your business is doing on Shopify. It is generally a helpful table to add to your reports because it includes key business metrics such as total number of customers, total amount of sales, and your *customer lifetime value.
*Your customer lifetime value is the total amount an average customer has spent on your products during their lifetime. This is an important metric because generally you want to spend less money in acquiring new customers and retaining them to have a profitable business. To be more specific, we calculate the amount of money spent on average every time an order is placed (average order value) and how many orders on average each customer has placed (purchase frequency). Customer lifetime value is the average order value multiplied by the purchase frequency.
📝The currency shown within the Shopify tab is pulled in from the Store Currency setting within your Shopify store.
Top referrals based on total sales
The top referrals table gives you a deeper understanding of your referral channels. For each referral channel, you'll see the following:
- Customers: The total number of people who have visited your store from this channel and placed an order with you
- Avg. Order Value: The average amount that a customer from this channel has spent for each order
- Total Sales: The total amount generated from customers who have visited your store from this channel
You can see the top referral channels for customers, average order value, or total sales, by clicking on the title to sort the table.
By understanding your top referral channels, you can refine your marketing strategy and invest more in the channels that are bringing in the most customers or the most valuable customers, or generating the most sales.
Top products based on units sold
The top products table shows you your best selling products. For each of the top products, you'll see many customers have bought it, how many units were sold, and how much sales was generated.
You’ll also see the top three referral channels that generated sales for each top product. This will help you understand where your customers are coming from and how well those channels are performing.
With this insight, you can refine your marketing approach. For example, if customers who have bought your best selling product are mostly visiting your store from Instagram, it might mean that product resonates with your Instagram audience. You could then share more content about that product on Instagram.
Adding tables and charts to a custom report
Finally, you can add any of the tables and charts from this area to custom report. Simply click the plus button at the top right of any chart you'd like to include. Learn more about creating custom reports here.
You can also export all data as both CSV and image files using the Export as... button at the top right of the page.
What's next for Shopify in Buffer?
This is our first step towards providing you with more data to understand your marketing efforts. We are looking to provide more Shopify data, as well as data from other sources in the future. If you have any requests, feel free to add it to our Suggestion Board (or perhaps upvote a similar suggestion) so our Product team can gauge the demand.