.png)
If you want to grow your business as efficiently as possible, then you need to look at the numbers to guide your decision-making. The best way to do so? By utilizing comprehensive data reporting systems such as Shopify Analytics or Google Analytics.
As a built-in and centralized reporting system for all Shopify store users, Shopify Analytics is one of the best analytics apps you can leverage. It provides valuable insights into a store’s sales, traffic, marketing, and customer behavior and tracks key metrics such as revenue, orders, conversion rate, and average order value to gauge overall store performance. On top of that, you can identify traffic sources to see which marketing funnels (social, search, ads, etc.) drive the most visits and sales to your landing pages or product pages.
All of this enables you to better analyze your target audience’s behavior, including how users interact with a store’s products, what their experience with your pages are, and who your top customers might be. With Shopify Analytics, you can also monitor product performance to spot your bestsellers and underperformers; this further informs your decision-making on inventory, merchandising, marketing, and ecommerce landing page design.
Today, we’re going to focus on how you can use your metrics from Shopify Analytics to make data-driven decisions about future sales trends and enhance customer personalization.
How to Use Shopify Analytics For Ecommerce Store Success
Future-proofing your ecommerce business can be difficult. There are simply too many variables and unknowns to account for. With the help of past data about your ecommerce store from Shopify reporting, however, some accurate and informed guesses can be made. Here’s everything you need to know about using Shopify Analytics to guide you business decision making for the future.
Analyze Historical Sales Data
Sales and business trends don’t exist in a vacuum, and oftentimes, the best way to start predicting what is to come, is to look at what has already been ongoing in an ecommerce store.
As a result, three key reports to consider include:
- “Sales over time” - This report identifies seasonal trends, year-over-year growth, and peak sales periods. When consulting this report, make sure to look for patterns that repeat annually.
- “Sales by product” - This report shows which products drive the most revenue, so you can predict future demand for top-sellers and phase out underperformers.
- “Sales by traffic source” reveals which marketing channels generate the most sales. Double down on high-performing channels (ex: running more paid ads on those channels, pushing more frequent content) to drive greater traffic and revenue.
Leverage Predictive Analytics in Shopify For Your Online Store
If you’re using Shopify Analytics, then you have access to its predictive analytics tools, which use machine learning to build models according to historical Shopify store analytics data to predict future outcomes. Key data sources include a variety of factors that can impact future sales, such as sales cycles, historical growth rates, and product-level sales and trends.
Based on its analysis, Shopify Analytics generates detailed sales predictions for your store which estimate sales revenue, order volume, and more for upcoming days, weeks, or months. In addition, as new sales data comes in, Shopify's predictive models will continuously learn and adapt their forecasts. Over time, the algorithms will refine their accuracy in a feedback loop, so that Shopify's sales predictions will become more reliable the longer you use the platform.
When it comes to customer cohort analysis, Shopify can generate a predicted spend tier report which displays the predicted value—or amount spent—of each customer in the selected cohort, so you can target customers that are part of the highest value cohorts.
Details such as customer name, the predicted spend tier, the number of orders that they have placed, and the total amount that they have spent are included in the report. Shopify Analytics looks at your customers' past interactions, including how often a customer has made purchases and how much the customer spent on average per order compared to the overall average spent per order, to identify the predicted spend tier per customer.
With predictive analytics in Shopify Analytics, you can make a solid stab as to which customer segments to target, and how many sales you can expect to make from a certain cohort of customers. This in turn has a ripple effect on the strategy of your business—from the inventory you need to stock, to the advertisement to landing page conversion funnel campaigns you should run, to the stockholders with whom you need to share this information with.
Act on Real-Time Data For Your Ecommerce Landing Pages
While you might already have a strategy chosen according to predictive analytics, it’s important to regularly check your Shopify Analytics dashboard to track changes in sales or traffic, and then alter your product and marketing strategy in response to those changes.
If there are any sudden spikes or dips that occur, go understand the cause; for example, did a marketing campaign or UGC mention by a leading influencer drive a surge in traffic, or did a poorly designed ecommerce landing page negatively influence sales?
Speed is of the essence in either of these cases. Make sure to react quickly to real-time insights, either to capitalize on anything you’re already doing right or correcting something that has been done wrong.
An example would be further promoting a trending product on key landing pages or even running a complete paid ad to landing page funnel to that product or service. Make sure to run ad to landing page funnels with consistent design assets, messaging, and product offers to drive more conversions from potential customers.
On the flip side, if you see a dip in your metrics, make sure to pause any underperforming marketing campaigns or A/B test a multivariate version of the struggling landing page to identify a better performing version. Resolve any pain points that you identify as obstacles for a site visitor’s user journey. By acting fast, you can minimize your chances of missing out on opportunities for your ecommerce brand or losing significant portions of revenue.
Forecast Inventory Needs
Predictive analytics can also be highly useful when it comes to forecasting demand for specific products to avoid stockouts or overordering. By analyzing “average inventory sold per day,” you can estimate how quickly you'll sell through current stock.
In addition, you can set reorder points based on the sales velocity of your ecommerce store to ensure you have enough lead time to replenish inventory before your product runs out of stock. Any instance where you have unfilled orders is essentially a missed opportunity to both deliver on customer expectations for your brand and grow your own sales.
Share Data with Stakeholders
Finally, make sure to provide sales forecasts to your logistics and customer service teams so they can plan accordingly when it comes to preparing inventory and managing expectations with customer support. Alert marketing to upcoming sales trends so they can develop promotions and relevant partnership content in advance.
From a business perspective, it’s also vital to share predicted revenue with your finance team to inform budgeting decisions and cash flow planning, and Shopify Analytics makes it easy for you to plan for the future.
By leveraging historical data, predictive analytics, and real-time insights in Shopify Analytics, you can accurately forecast sales trends to drive smarter inventory, marketing, and finance decisions. The key is to regularly monitor your data at all times and act quickly on insights to stay ahead of the curve.
Acting On Your Insights From Analytics: Grow Your Ecommerce Store With Replo
Shopify Analytics is a powerful tool that, when used correctly, can provide you with the insights needed to optimize your ecommerce store. By understanding and leveraging the data available, you can make informed improvements that drive more traffic, increase conversions, and ultimately grow your topline.
The key is to keep your finger on the pulse of your store’s performance with the help of analytics, and then apply those insights to your ecommerce landing pages, marketing, inventory, and finance operations, so you can stay ahead of the competition.
Replo offers all the services you need in a single platform to help you implement your data analytics insights to your ecommerce landing pages, from A/B testing to advanced AI features to page building. As the leading Shopify landing page builder with a no-code editor, we have all the tools you need to build your product pages quickly and with ease.
If you’re not sure where to start with your landing pages, try our hundreds of landing page templates inspired by top brands and high converting pages. Save time by adapting product page templates (or however many as you like) for your own site. We integrate directly with Shopify and any type of plugin you might need for your ecommerce business.
Best of all, Replo comes with a community of Experts for hire and 24/7 support to help you make the most out of Replo. For more informational resources on all topics related to marketing and ecommerce—from best ecommerce landing page and ads funnels to Shopify A/B testing—check out our blog.
Visit us to get started, or reach out to schedule a demo with us. Join our Slack community and follow us on X to stay updated.