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Useful Shopify Analytics Reports
Your Shopify analytics has a lot of information. It’s colourful, it has a ‘Live View’ that shows dots moving around a map of Australia or wherever you’re selling in the world. But which reports are good for answering key questions that will help you understand the impact of your marketing, both the good and bad of it!?
When you’re spending money and effort on marketing, you need to understand what’s working and what’s not. Your Shopify analytics can genuinely help you ask the right questions and answer quite a few of them.
While there are some things Shopify can’t tell you (we’ll cover those below as well), the following is a good checklist to work through on a regular basis, ideally monthly, so you can get actionable insights on where to focus your marketing and optimisation efforts to drive more sales.
Your Shopify Analytics Checklist
Some of these you’ll be able to answer directly from Shopify. Others will point you toward gaps in the data. Both are useful to know.
1. Which channel is actually driving my sales?
You want to understand which marketing channel is driving people to your website and the conversion rate based on sales made. Not just for the first time, but also for multiple visits depending on when the sale eventually happens. In Shopify, you can view where traffic came from but also see the number of new versus returning visitors. On the higher plans in Shopify you can also change the attribution method from ‘last click’ to ‘first click’ to understand how the marketing channel contributed to the sale. More on this in the attribution section below.
Where to look: Analytics > Reports > Sessions by referrer
2. Is my paid spend actually driving sales?
If you’re spending $5,000 a month on ads, you need to know whether that spend is generating a positive Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) or ROI (Return On Investment). As Shopify will be your source of truth for sales, the reports showing where traffic has come from and the conversion rate for each channel will help you answer this question. You will still need to calculate ROAS/ROI, as you can’t import ad spend into the Shopify analytics reports. But understanding the number of users and sales is what you need to help answer this question. However, to see the specific traffic from ads, you will need to be using UTM’s to make the traffic from your ads visible as well. Again, see below for our discussion of the need for UTM’s to make the most of your Shopify Analytics.
Where to look: Analytics > Reports > Sessions by referrer in conjunction with UTMs
3. Where are people dropping off before they buy?
It’s one thing to get traffic to your website, but another to make the most of the visitors once they are there. Therefore, you want to be looking at where people ‘leave’ your website before making a purchase. The key things you’re looking for are either:
- Arriving and leaving immediately, as this is a sign that you are targeting potentially the wrong’ people’ or your website landing pages are not doing a good job (both are points for improvement).
- People are browsing on your website, looking at products, and even adding to cart, but abandon the website before purchasing. Understanding where they leave gives you a place to focus on improving your website's conversion rate.
This is a no-brainer as an activity, as it’s about maximising all the traffic you are getting and making sure you’re getting the ‘right’ (or qualified people likely to want to purchase from you) traffic. It will contribute to your ad's effectiveness by increasing the overall ‘sales’ or conversions!
Where to look: Analytics > Reports > Conversion rate breakdown.
This report shows the drop off at each stage of the funnel: sessions, product views, add to cart, checkout, and purchase.
In addition to the above, you need to consider session volume and quality. These two things are not the same thing. Ten thousand sessions converting at 0.2% is a very different situation from two thousand sessions converting at 3%. High traffic from a campaign that doesn’t convert is a signal worth paying attention to.
Where to look: Analytics > Reports > Sessions by referrer
Compare conversion rate by source, not just session volume.
There is also a bounce rate report in the available reports, but you’ll need to reconfigure the report dimensions to show you which pages are bouncing (using Landing page URL). Using GA4 in conjunction with your Shopify analytics will provide more useful behaviour information on bounce rates, including the ability to see the channel to landing page bounce rate and engagement rates. I address more on this below.
Where to look: Analytics > Reports > Bounce rate over time
4. How does this month compare to the same month last year?
Real growth visibility requires more than a rolling 30-day view. Year-on-year comparisons tell you whether the business is genuinely building, or whether you’re going in circles. Shopify allows date-range comparisons in most reports; use them.
Where to look: Most reports in Analytics > Reports
All your reports support custom date ranges. Set your date range, then use the ‘Compare’ option to select the same period last year.
One limitation to note: Shopify retains report data for 13 months on most plans. If you haven’t been doing regular CSV exports, data older than 13 months will be gone. Set a reminder to export quarterly or more frequently so that you can start to understand YOY (over longer periods) behavior, particularly seasonality.
5. What’s my one source of truth when my agency, Meta, and Shopify are all showing different numbers?
Every ad platform generally takes credit for more sales than actually happened. When three reports give you three different answers, it’s not because one of them is lying, it’s because they each measure differently. Understanding why is the first step to trusting any of them.
Where to look: Shopify is your most reliable source for revenue and order numbers, as it’s server-side and unaffected by ad blockers or browser privacy settings. Treat it as your financial record. Use GA4 for channel-level attribution. We’ll cover this more below.
If you can answer all of the above questions with confidence, your analytics setup is doing its job. If you find it hard to answers, or require a call to your agency, that’s useful information. It tells you where the gaps are and what to address first.
What more do you need to know about Shopify Analytics?
There are some limitations or caveats when using Shopify Analytics.
Using UTM parameters to see Ad traffic and conversion data in your Shopify Analytics
Shopify’s 2025 update made meaningful attribution reporting available across Basic and Grow plans so the marketing reports that show which channels drove traffic and sales are now accessible to most stores. That’s a genuine improvement.
But there’s still a significant gap: Shopify can’t categorise a lot of traffic, particularly when email campaigns and paid ads are involved. Traffic that should be attributed to your Facebook ad or your Klaviyo campaign often arrives looking like ‘Direct’ meaning Shopify has no idea where it came from. This is where UTMs become essential.
What are UTM parameters?
UTM parameters are small tags you add to the end of a URL when you’re running a marketing campaign. They look like this:
yourstore.com.au?utm_source=meta&utm_medium=paidsocial&utm_campaign=wintersale
When someone clicks a link with UTM parameters and lands on your store, Shopify (and GA4) can read those tags and record exactly where that visit came from. Without them, paid traffic frequently shows up as ‘Direct’ and your channel reports become unreliable.
What UTMs unlock in Shopify Analytics
- Shopify’s marketing attribution report becomes meaningful. You can see which campaigns sent traffic that actually converted.
- Sessions by referrer reflects your actual channel breakdown. Rather than a muddled mix of direct traffic and mystery sessions.
- You can start to properly answer Questions 1 and 4 from the checklist above which channel drove sales, and whether your paid traffic is actually converting.
The UTM minimum
You should use UTM’s for links used in paid ads, email campaigns, influencer or collaboration campaigns and any other campaign activity you have going on. Use the following in your UTM link at a minimum:
- utm_source (e.g. meta, google, klaviyo)
- utm_medium (e.g. paidsocial, cpc, email)
- utm_campaign (e.g. wintersale2025)
Google has a free UTM builder at gadevtools.google/campaignurlbuilder. Most email platforms (Klaviyo, Mailchimp) can autotag your links if you enable the UTM tracking setting worth checking before your next send but you do want to give consideration to forcing a standard use so you can get the most out of them in your reporting.
UTMs don’t fix everything, but they fix a lot. If you’re running paid campaigns, they help to give you visibility that is often lost in your analytics (regardless of where you are getting these from). This is the first thing to address before worrying about anything else.
Understanding Shopify’s Attribution Options
This is worth understanding because it’s changed. Previously, Shopify used last click attribution only and 100% of the credit went to whichever channel sent the final visit before a purchase. Everything that came before got nothing.
Shopify now gives you three options for how to view attribution:
- First click credit goes to the first channel that brought the customer to your store
- Last click credit goes to the final channel before purchase (the old default)
- Last non direct click credit goes to the last identifiable channel, ignoring ‘Direct’ visits
Where to find this: Analytics > Reports > Performance by marketing channel or Performance by Referral channel
You can toggle the attribution model on the right-hand side panel to change the attribution from last click, or Last non-direct click or First click.
This is useful. Switching between first-click and last-click lets you see, for example, whether Meta ads are driving initial awareness (high first-click credit) even when email is closing the sale (high last-click credit). That’s a much more honest picture of how your marketing works together.
Example: A customer sees your Instagram ad on Monday, then Googles your brand on Wednesday, then opens your email on Friday and buys. Under last click, email gets 100% of the credit. Under first click, Meta gets it. The reality is somewhere in between and comparing both views helps you understand which channels are warming customers up versus closing them.
What this doesn’t solve: Shopify still can’t see your ad spend, your email open rates, or data from inside your ad platforms. So while you can see which channel gets attribution credit, you still can’t answer ‘was my $3,000 in Meta ads actually worth it and was it profitable?’ from Shopify alone. That’s the remaining gap and it’s covered in the next section.
What Shopify Still Can’t See
Cross Channel Spend and Results
Even with UTMs in place and attribution options enabled, Shopify has no visibility into what’s happening inside your ad platforms, your email tool, or your organic channels and it can’t combine them.
So when you’re trying to answer, ‘is my $3,000 a month in ads working?’, Shopify shows you how many sessions came from paid sources and how many of those converted. It doesn’t tell you what those sessions cost, what your return on ad spend actually is, or how your paid traffic compares to organic in terms of return on investment.
Getting that cross-channel view with ad spend alongside Shopify revenue, and more granular conversion points (not all conversions are about sales eg. Lead generation or email sign up), and behaviour data from GA4, alongside channel conversion rates requires pulling data from multiple sources into one place. Shopify’s analytics can’t do this, regardless of plan.
This is where a Looker Studio dashboard becomes valuable. Looker Studio is a free Google product that lets you connect multiple data sources and build a single view of your marketing performance. We’ll come back to this in the ‘Stepping Up’ section below.
Session Quality: Are Your Channels Sending the Right People?
Shopify counts sessions. What it doesn’t show in depth is the quality of those sessions eg. how long people stayed, how many product pages they visited, or whether they engaged with content or left in seconds.
That said, there are a couple of useful reports worth checking:
- Sessions by referrer (Analytics > Reports > Sessions by referrer): shows session volume and conversion rate by source. The conversion rate column is where quality shows a channel that is sending lots of users but converting poorly is worth questioning.
- Online store conversion over time (Analytics > Reports > Online store conversion over time): useful for spotting drops that correlate with specific campaigns or periods.
The practical check: compare conversion rate across channels, not just session volume. A Meta campaign sending 5,000 sessions at 0.3% conversion is performing very differently to an email campaign sending 800 sessions at 4% conversion. Volume without conversion rate is a vanity metric.
For deeper session quality data, time on site, scroll depth, pages per session, video engagement you’ll need GA4. Shopify doesn’t capture this level of behavioural detail natively.
Stepping Up: Supplementing Your Shopify Analytics
The gaps we’ve covered are real, but they’re fillable and the primary tools are free. Here’s the order of priority.
Step 1: Get your UTMs right (do this first)
As covered above, UTM parameters on every paid link are the single highest-value, lowest-effort improvement you can make. If you’re not using them yet, start here. Everything else builds on having clean attribution data.
If you use Klaviyo or Mailchimp, check your account settings; both platforms have an option to automatically add UTM tracking to all links in your campaigns. Onetime setup, ongoing benefit.
Step 2: Set up GA4 properly
Google Analytics 4 is free and fills in the gaps Shopify leaves: cross-channel traffic quality data, full-funnel behaviour where you can define key events or conversion points, session engagement metrics, and attribution that goes beyond last click.
The important word is ‘properly’. A default GA4 installation gives you some data, but not the useful kind. To get real value from it, you need:
- Purchase and add to cart events configured so GA4 can see your full funnel
- Any additional conversion points, e.g., email signups or video or key page engagement
- GA4 linked to Google Ads if you’re running paid search
- UTMs on all paid links so GA4 attributes sessions correctly (see Step 1)
- Referral exclusions set up so payment gateways like PayPal and Afterpay don’t appear as traffic sources
8 min read > The GA4 set up needed to get useful insights
Step 3: A Looker Studio dashboard that combines both
Once GA4 is properly configured, you can connect both Shopify and GA4 to a single Looker Studio dashboard. You can combine data and view it alongside so that you have a complete 360-degree view of all your marketing activity.
Looker Studio is also perfect for designing a report that makes sense to you, as the business owner, to quickly get the answers you want. My experience with my clients is that their reports often show some of the picture or useful data, but also a lot of noise from other metrics that are not very useful without context. Every business is different, and relying on templated reports is where people get confused and frustrated when they aren’t able to answer key questions, such as " Is my marketing working!”
Looker Studio is a free Google product, but there is a learning curve to set it up well. You can connect GA4, the Google Search Console, Google Sheets and Google Ads without the need for any additional connectors. For Shopify data, however, you will need a third-party connector (such as SyncWith, PowerMyMetrics, or PorterMetrics) to handle the connection, and you will need a paid subscription to get the most out of these tools.
Once it’s set up, the dashboard updates automatically and can be shared or scheduled, so instead of spending time gathering data, you’re spending time interpreting it and acting on it.
What the combined view lets you answer: Shopify tells me I made $48,000 in revenue this month. GA4 shows me that conversion metrics for not only sales, but other interactions on the site (as defined by you), such as key pages that support sales, email freebies that support return visits as a complete 360 view of your marketing. It will also show you the health and growth of your email list or organic social efforts, and for your ads. With all of this data, you can combine sales data with cost of ads, to give you ROAS or ROI.
Not sure what's missing from your setup?
A 60-minute Diagnostic Session will show you exactly what Shopify is tracking, whether your UTMs are set up correctly, what GA4 is (or isn’t) capturing, and what you’d need in place to get a clear picture of whether your marketing is working.
Find out more about whether an independent review and discussion would be valuable to your business.
About the Author
Kirri Romero is a multi-channel marketing optimisation and GA4/Google Tag Manager specialist at The Online Fix, a Melbourne-based Marketing and analytics specialist. She helps business owners stop guessing what’s working in their marketing by building proper tracking foundations, clear Looker Studio dashboards, and honest reporting that reflects what’s actually happening in the business and helping people to learn how to interpret their data to gain actionable insights.
