How to boost revenue with Shopify analytics

With nearly 5 million active Shopify stores worldwide, you're in good company if your business uses this ecommerce platform. Like millions of others, you probably chose Shopify for its intuitive interface, scalability and built-in analytics.

But if you’re still struggling to track performance across channels, make sense of customer behavior or prove what’s actually driving sales, you’re not getting the full value out of Shopify and its powerful analytics features.

Shopify Analytics gives you a clear picture of the customer journey, from ad view to conversion and repeat purchase. When your data is clean, connected and accessible, you can stop guessing and start optimizing. That’s how you stay ahead.

How to access analytics within Shopify

If you're already using Shopify, you’ve got access to a powerful built-in analytics tool — but just having the data isn’t enough. To actually grow your store, you need to know how to use it.

To access Shopify reports, follow these simple steps:

1. Log in to your Shopify store.

1. On the left-hand menu, click on Analytics.

Here, you'll see a variety of reports based on your Shopify plan. 

What can you track with Shopify Analytics?

Shopify Analytics gives you access to a range of reports that help you track what’s happening across your store, from how customers find you to what drives them to buy.

Here are some of the key themes Shopify’s reports cover:

• Traffic and acquisition: Understand where your visitors are coming from — whether it’s search, social, email or direct — so you can see which channels are bringing in the most valuable traffic.
• On-site behavior: See how customers interact with your store: which pages they land on, what products they view and where they drop off. This helps you spot friction points and improve the user experience.
• Sales performance: Track core business metrics like total sales, average order value and conversion rate. You can also dig into things like product performance, order trends and discount impact.

• Customer insights: Analyze customer behavior over time — such as repeat purchase rates, time between orders and customer lifetime value — to refine your retention strategy.

• Marketing effectiveness: Measure how well your campaigns are performing, including traffic from specific sources and how those visits translate into sales.

All of these reports are filterable by time, geography and other dimensions, giving you the flexibility to zero in on the trends that matter most.

Ecommerce analytics tools you might use with Shopify for better insights

You can access your analytics directly in your Shopify account, like we’ve outlined above. But if it’s detailed insights you’re looking for in the context of your customer journey as a whole, these are the tools you'll need to interpret your Shopify data:

• Google (GA4): Provides deeper insights into website traffic, user behavior and conversion paths, allowing you to understand where customers come from and how they interact with your store.

• A third-party platform like Funnel: Automates data collection and reporting by consolidating analytics from multiple sources, making it easier to track marketing performance and measure ROI across different channels. Funnel can contextualize your Shopify data with other integrated data sources, giving you more visibility into what’s happening at each touchpoint along the customer journey. That way, you can better understand the effectiveness of your marketing as a whole and how it impacts profitability.

How taking a data-driven approach to Shopify Analytics drives business growth

Shopify Analytics can help drive growth, optimize the customer journey and make your marketing so much more effective by: 

Identifying top-performing products 

You can use Shopify Analytics’ Profit By Product report to see which products generate the most profit for your business. Using that information, you can optimize your messaging and your inventory for sales. For example, if you sell fitness gear and resistance bands consistently sell out, you can increase stock and create bundles to upsell.

To view profit margin reports, you can filter your Reports list to show only these specific reports.

Steps:

1. In your Shopify admin, navigate to Analytics > Reports.
2. Select the Category filter.
3. Click on Profit Margin to filter and display only Profit Margin reports.

For each product that had a cost recorded against it when it was sold, the following information will appear: 

The Gross Profit by Product report shows your gross profit for each product within the chosen date range.

Tracking customer acquisition costs (CAC) to ensure profitability

If Facebook ads bring in customers at $20 CAC but each customer only spends $25, your profit margins are too low. In response, you might shift your budget to higher-ROI marketing channels like email, where CAC is lower. 

To calculate your CAC: 

1. Identify your total marketing costs: This includes spending on ads, campaigns and promotions.
2. Get the number of new customers: You can pull this from your Shopify Customer reports or the Sales by Customer data.
3. Calculate CAC: Divide your total marketing costs by the number of new customers acquired during the same period.

To track this more easily, you may need to integrate third-party apps like Google Analytics, Facebook Ads or other marketing tools like Funnel that help you track your spending and customer acquisition more directly.

Optimizing ad spend by focusing on high-ROI channels

Marketing reports in Shopify provide detailed insights into your online store traffic. For example, if you run Google and TikTok ads and see that TikTok brings cheaper traffic but lower conversion rates, you can adjust your strategy and shift your budget to higher-performing channels or adjust your creative and test what impact it has on your conversions.

Reducing cart abandonment by identifying drop-off points

If Shopify analytics shows that 70% of users abandon their carts at the shipping page, you can add free shipping or a clearer shipping policy to recover sales.

Using data to personalize marketing campaigns

If data analysis shows repeat customers buy skincare products every six weeks, you can set up automated email reminders with personalized discounts to bring them back.

Forecasting demand to manage inventory efficiently

If you sell fashion and see summer dresses peak in May and June, you can increase stock in April to meet demand without overproducing.

Identifying customer lifetime value (LTV) to focus on high-value buyers

If analytics show that customers who buy a premium coffee maker are more likely to purchase accessories later, you can run retargeting ads or email campaigns specifically for those buyers.

Testing and refining pricing strategies

If you sell phone cases, for example, you can use A/B testing to see if a $19.99 or $24.99 price point leads to higher overall revenue while maintaining sales volume.

Monitoring operational costs and profit margins

If analytics show that a product’s shipping costs are eating into profits, you can negotiate better rates with suppliers or switch to a different fulfillment center.

6 ways to optimize Shopify Analytics for revenue growth

Optimizing your analytics allows you to make data-driven decisions that directly impact your revenue. Here’s how:

1. Define your key metrics

You can’t move what you can’t measure. Decide what you most want to track, like: 

• Sales performance: Track total revenue, average order value (AOV) and conversion rates to understand how well your store is driving sales and where improvements can be made.

• Customer insights: Analyze the balance between new and returning customers, customer lifetime value (CLV), purchase frequency, time between purchases and repeat purchase rate to optimize retention and customer loyalty strategies.

• Marketing performance: Measure customer acquisition cost (CAC), return on ad spend (ROAS) and attribution insights to evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and refine your campaigns.

• Product analytics: Focus on best-selling products, inventory turnover and profit margins per product to identify high-performing items and ensure efficient stock management.

2. Improve your ecommerce data collection

The types and quality of data that you gather are critical to producing high-quality insights: 

• Use UTM tracking for campaign performance: UTM parameters allow you to track the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. Be sure to use the campaign naming convention feature to keep your campaign names organized and consistent for easy tracking.

• Avoid common Shopify tracking mistakes: Ensure you’re tracking all conversions accurately and preventing duplicate transactions (E.g., not including refunds). Regularly check your tracking setup to catch any issues that could lead to data discrepancies or lost insights.

3. Optimize your customer behavior to increase conversions

To encourage more conversions, focus on understanding key touchpoints and personalizing the shopping experience by:

• Analyzing funnel drop-off points: Identify where customers are abandoning the purchase process. Use this data to pinpoint bottlenecks and then improve the user experience at those critical stages.

• Heatmaps and session recordings: Shopify Analytics can tell you a lot, but heatmaps and session recordings give you a deeper understanding of customer behavior. See exactly where customers click, scroll and hesitate, helping you make data-driven adjustments to your site’s layout and design.

• Personalization strategies based on customer behavior: Use insights like abandoned cart data to trigger personalized follow-up emails or offer dynamic product recommendations to boost engagement and increase conversion rates.

4. Integrate Google Analytics

Integrate Google Analytics 4 (GA4) with your Shopify store for valuable insights into your site’s performance:

1. Create a Google account and Google Analytics account: If you don’t already have one, sign up for a Google account and then create a Google Analytics account.

1. Create or move to a Google Analytics 4 property: Set up a new Google Analytics 4 (GA4) property or migrate your existing property to GA4 to access enhanced tracking features.

1. Add Google Analytics 4 tags: Install the necessary GA4 tags on your Shopify store to track user behavior and interactions across your site.

1. Link your Google Analytics account to your Google Ads account: Connect your Google Analytics account to Google Ads to track ad performance and optimize your campaigns based on your website data.

5. Automate your reporting and dashboards

Use Funnel to integrate your Shopify data with GA4 and Paid Ad data. Once your data is aggregated, you’ll be able to derive direct insights from centralized dashboards like this one: 

Get access to automated revenue reports that update on a schedule (daily, weekly or monthly).

6. Adopt a learning approach for continuous data optimization

By adopting a learning agenda and continuous ecommerce data optimization, you can:

• Stay ahead of market trends: Shopify is always evolving, and so are your customers. Continuously learning and testing new strategies helps you keep up with changes and stay ahead of the competition.

• Make smarter decisions faster: When you regularly analyze your store’s performance, you’re not guessing what works — you’re using real data to fine-tune your marketing, pricing and product strategy.

• Keep customers coming back: The more you learn about your shoppers, the better you can personalize their experience. That means better recommendations, smarter promotions and more loyal customers.

• Boost profits over time: Small optimizations add up. By constantly refining your pricing, promotions and inventory based on real-time insights, you can increase revenue and cut unnecessary costs.

Knowing how to use Shopify Analytics to drive revenue can help you scale your ecommerce store. But you’ll want to go a little further with your data to make sure you’re getting reliable insights quickly. So, how do you know how your current setup stacks up against what’s possible?

Is your Shopify Analytics setup offering you the insights you need?

It’s easy to assume your current reports are “good enough” — until you realize they’re missing context. A quick self-assessment can reveal where your Shopify analytics might be holding you back. Answer these five questions to spot where your current setup might be slowing you down:

• Can you view ROAS and CAC by product, campaign or SKU?

• Are you tracking metrics like AOV and LTV without manual calculations?

• Is your Shopify revenue automatically blended with ad spend for daily insights?

• Can you slice performance by channel, product or promotion, without writing SQL?

• Are you spending more time analyzing data than wrangling spreadsheets?

How many negatives did you get?

If you answered ‘no’ on a couple (or all five!), don’t worry. Many ecommerce teams hit a ceiling with out-of-the-box reporting. However, even one ‘no’ means it’s worth exploring how you could improve your ecommerce analytics setup. 

Let’s look at how one company turned its fragmented data situation around with a fully automated analytics engine and how you can use Funnel to get more out of your Shopify data. 

Real results: how Babyshop Group scaled their ecom analytics

Babyshop Group, a leading global ecommerce brand, wanted better visibility across marketing and sales. Using Funnel, they centralized Shopify data and blended it with ad spend from key platforms like Meta and Google. 

The result? A fully automated, multi-market dashboard that unlocked SKU-level ROAS, campaign-level insights and serious time savings for the team.

What made it possible for Babyshop Group to scale its reporting without scaling complexity? The answer lies in how they used Funnel to bring everything together and why so many D2C brands are doing the same.

How Funnel helps unlock the power of Shopify Analytics

Shopify is one of Funnel’s most widely used connectors, especially for brands and agencies scaling direct-to-consumer operations.

With Funnel, you get an always-on ecom performance engine that:

• Combines Shopify data and ad platform spend to give you unified ROAS, CAC and LTV metrics.
• Automates reporting across all sales and marketing channels, freeing up your team’s time.
• Aligns data granularity using no-code transformations, so campaign, SKU and daily-level data matches across platforms.
• Exports clean, normalized data to Looker Studio, Sheets, GA4 or your data warehouse, ready for reporting or analysis.

Funnel becomes your always-on ecom performance engine, helping you scale smarter, not just faster.

At a glance: what Funnel offers Shopify users

Here’s how Funnel’s most-used features directly solve the Shopify reporting challenges that slow down scaling brands.

Whether you’re an ecommerce manager, performance marketer or D2C strategist, Funnel simplifies your stack, sharpens your metrics and saves you from spreadsheet overload.

Confident decisions start with complete data

To grow profitably on Shopify, you need answers you can trust — not just numbers in a dashboard. Funnel helps unify your marketing and sales performance so you can pinpoint what’s working, cut what’s not and scale what’s profitable.