Why You Should Supplement Shopify Analytics with Data-Driven Marketing Tools

Understanding the user habits of your e-commerce website is the first step towards converting viewers into paying customers. Shopify analytics provides data on user behavior, customer acquisition, and product reports. While these insights can be useful, their limited scope often invites more questions than they resolve. Shopify analytics is a great tool for finding out who is buying and how they came to your site. However, it doesn’t give any information as to why people are buying. Without additional metrics that help further clarify and explain what’s working on your website, you’re often left in the dark. Let’s take a look at what Shopify analytics can offer. We’ll then point out how additional data-driven marketing tools like Verfacto can paint an even fuller picture, allowing you to customize your content, boost sales, and increase user retention.

Data-Driven Marketing Tools – Behavior Reports

If your store is on the Basic Shopify plan or higher, you will have access to a range of behavioral insights. These insights help categorize, market, and promote your products. Shopify does give insight into statistics like how many users reached checkout or conversion rate. They do little to actually suggest an explanation for these metrics. While Shopify will tell you who is buying and what is selling well, they don’t paint a picture as to why these things are occurring.

A more detailed behavioral report will catalog the pages visited and time spent on each page, outlining how your site is cultivating its sales. While Shopify’s strategy of separating metrics gives you several pieces of the puzzle, additional data tools will put these pieces together. It will allow you to trace, with data-driven marketing metrics, the correlation between time on certain pages and the conversion rate per page.

With this increased knowledge of user behavior, you’ll be able to optimize your e-shop to best accommodate user practices, increasing your sales over time. Awareness of user behavior is always the first step to successful on-site marketing. Additional behavioral reports will help you understand the whole picture.

Channel Tracking and Attribution

Acquisition reports give information about how visitors are coming onto your site. Shopify provides three main metrics for this part of data collection:

1. Sessions over time – The total number of sessions and visitors within an elected period
2. By referrer – If your users come from a Google search, from your store directly, or through a website referral
3. According to location – Where in the world visitors are connecting from

While these metrics give basic channel tracking functions, they don’t track individually for different campaigns. You may have one campaign that is generating a lot of leads. However, some may be contributing very little to your overall user acquisition. Additional analytical tools will let you specify which distinct channel you’d like to draw data from. Every single step of the way from adding to carts to measuring LTV, you’ll have an individual data set.

By analyzing this data, you can make an informed decision about which advertising channels to focus on. Not only will these additional data-driven marketing tools boost customer acquisition over time. However, they’ll also save you money by correcting ineffective channels and focusing on those that work.

Product Data

Shopify, alongside any CMS, will let you know which of your products are your best-sellers. But as business owners, we know that sales rarely happen in isolation. Instead, customers pair products together, bundling and buying in quantity. With more advanced analytical tools, you’ll get insight into which products are paired together frequently. By using this data, you can then position these products collectively, further connecting them and boosting cross-sales while you do so.

Data-Driven Marketing Tools – User Segmentation

By segmenting users based on certain characteristics, you can generate separate categories that you can then target accordingly. While one category of users may respond well to a type of campaign, others may have little interest in it. Knowing the difference between how user segments react will allow you to optimize your website and marketing campaigns, increasing your overall ROAS with personalization.

As a CMS platform, Shopify does include some useful customer segmentation reports. On the Basic Shopify plan, these include metrics like customers by location, one-time customers, returning customers, and the difference in sales between first-time and returning customers. The Advanced Shopify plan takes this one step further, introducing segments that track ‘at-risk customers’ and loyal customers. These data metrics allow you to target specific users based on their habits, creating personalized discounts, sales, and marketing objectives for each segment.

One of the limitations with Shopify’s user segmentation is that although users are separated in line with the above metrics. Their individual behavior is not then considered. You could have two customers from the same location, which Shopify would then place into the same category. However, one of these customers could be a trendy buyer, while the other is a discount-lover. Data-driven marketing platforms like Verfacto that have advanced user segmentation allow you to understand your customers on a deeper level. Although there are some connecting characteristics, user behavior can vary greatly. By categorizing users by their behavior, instead of blanket characteristics, you can more accurately target certain customers.

Once these analytical tools break your users down into their distinct user segments, you can optimize your website on a more personal level. This even extends to calculating the potential ROAS of retargeting specific user segments. The more data your sales platform has about your customers, the easier it becomes to effectively target users and convert them into buyers.

Final Thoughts on Data-Driven Marketing Tools

What gets measured, gets improved. While Shopify analytics is certainly on the right track, there is still a lot of headway to be made. Knowing how your users act is the first step towards accommodating customers and changing the flow of your website to boost conversions. By opting for a more powerful data-driven marketing platform, you can transform the way your business records user behavior, boosting ROAS, increasing conversions, and getting to the bottom of why users stay on your site.