In nearly any shopping environment, customers are king. They have the power of the internet in their grasp and the ability to access product reviews, quickly compare prices between your store and others, and vote with their wallets. This is no more true than in the Shopify realm, where your every goal boils down to showing customers why your product, service, brand, etc. is the perfect fit to satisfy their needs. Their expectations are high, and it’s your job to exceed those expectations.
The only way to do that, and to even see what your customers want from your brand, is from data. That’s where Shopify theme customization comes in.
Shopify theme tracking and analytics customizations
If you want to penetrate this rapidly growing market and continue to grow with it over the next several years, you will need to understand data and rely heavily on ecommerce analytics in every part of your customer buying journey.
These five examples of tracking and analytics Shopify theme customization can help you get started.
1. Install a Tracking Code on Your Shopify Theme
On the surface, the concept of analytics seems simple. In reality, there are many more factors that go into making informed, data-driven decisions with your Shopify business than the number of times a certain action takes place. Some of these factors include privacy settings, where a customer is accessing your content or website from, how different browsers perform and define each action, and even the stability of each customer’s internet connection.
That’s where installing tracking code can help you organize any orders placed on your site, gather data on what customer types are drawn to which products, and more. These can be added to your Shopify theme in one of two ways. First, through a tagging app like Order Tagger and Smart Tags, or second, through manual code injection. If you go the manual code injection route, you can either hire a developer or do it yourself, depending on your time and skill set. And if you choose to install an app, be sure to find one that has all the features you need and that integrates well with the rest of your tech stack.
Regardless of which option you choose, you can manage the data through either Google Analytics or through Google Tag Manager.
2. Set up Google Analytics
Between pandemic living over the past few years and the ever-increasing adoption of internet use, the number of people making purchases online is continuously growing. According to Statista, online retail sales accounted for about $5.2 Trillion worldwide in 2021. This figure is expected to grow by 56% over the next few years, reaching $8.1 Trillion dollars worldwide by 2026.
To date, all of the most successful stores have one thing in common: their ability to pivot their strategies based on data from their store. Google Analytics plays a decided role in that.
With it, you can find demographic information about your website visitors, like age and gender, as well as data on their geographic location, interests, and behaviors.
You can also create custom segments for website visitors and customers according to their behaviors, run conversion-rate optimization (CRO) tests, and more. The possibilities are endless for getting a comprehensive view of your store’s performance, and with Google’s sunsetting of Universal Analytics (UA) in favor of GA 4, we’re expecting it to stay that way.
Unlike UA, which employs a session-based data model, GA 4’s model is event-based. According to Google, this means businesses can now measure “across platforms and devices using multiple forms of identity,” while still seeing all of your data in one place. This includes first-party data, cookies for tracking wherever they’re available, and any “Google Signals” from consumers who have opted-in to personalized ads.
3. Track and analyze user behavior
User behavior tools like Lucky Orange, Hotjar, and MixPanel can also give you insights into data related to engagement with your products, including heatmaps to show where users spend the most time when visiting your site, product list views, product detail views, “add to cart” clicks, product removals from basket, clicks to the checkout page, and unique purchases.
These tools can also give you insights into customizations to your Shopify theme that would make a difference in conversions, including updates to your product pages, product imagery, and more.
4. Utilize purpose-built analytics solutions
Purpose-built analytics tools like Daasity, Triple Whale, or Littledata are great options for supplementing the data from Google Analytics and customizing your Shopify theme.
Apps like these enable higher accuracy when interpreting data from your store via actionable insights from comprehensive dashboards, sales forecasting, omnichannel marketing and advertising campaigns, and even fraud risk prediction.
Some apps, like Fueled, have even been designed with GA4 specifically in mind. They supplement the insights that Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager already provide you with, and they arm you with more of the tools necessary to properly dissect, digest, and diffuse your store insights into robust plans for the future.
Installing these tools often requires little to no coding knowledge, and many have teams dedicated to getting you properly onboarded and setup without a hitch.
5. Customize your shopify dashboard
The reports you can get from your Shopify dashboard are limited based on your subscription plan, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t useful as you grow. When coupled with the tracking and analytics customizations we mentioned earlier, your Shopify Dashboard can help you become a powerhouse in the Ecommerce space.
Once you start using Shopify Plus (if you haven’t already), you’ll gain access to automatic tracking across three submenus: Dashboards, Reports, and Live View.
The Dashboards menu can be customized to show you total sales and total number of visits to your store, data on your returning customers and visitors, and your store’s conversion rate, average order value, and total orders.
The Reports menu can give you information on overall sales trends for your store, acquisition rates and profit margins, customer behaviors, and your overall store finances.
Finally, the Live View menu allows you to see everything for your store in real time. This includes live visitors on the site, current visitor behaviors, and total orders. This menu is especially helpful when coupled with the user behavior tracking customizations we mentioned earlier, as it enables you to keep track of your store’s progress at any time.
Closing Thoughts
If you still have questions on what tracking and analytics customizations you can make in your store, and how you can make them work for your success, don’t panic.
Tracking and analytics in Shopify or any Ecommerce store aren’t a one-and-done deal. The more you do with your store, and the better you get at analyzing data from it, the more opportunities you have to improve. Think of it like pushing a snowball down a snow-covered hill. As it rolls, the snowball accumulates more snow, getting bigger and bigger.
The same goes for your store data. The more you look into it and learn how to harness and interpret that data, the more that well of information grows.
In the meantime, we’ll keep rolling out posts like this to help you access even more of that well and customize your Shopify store for the best long-term growth and success possible.