We Found the Best Shopify Analytics Solutions on the Market

Shopify hosts a wide variety of eCommerce stores. Some of the most popular categories include:

• Apparel
• Toys
• Groceries
• Pet Supplies
• Shoes
• Jewelry
• Electronics
• Vintage or collector’s items

Many sellers also use Shopify to expand their physical store location. This trend has accelerated in recent years as more business owners pursue an omnichannel strategy with both physical and online stores.

The best Shopify tools should provide you with actionable data. In other words, it’s not enough just to know how long customers are staying on your store’s page or what they are buying – you need to interpret the data to customize your products and services to better serve your customers. Also, check out this article for tips on how to drive more traffic to your Shopify store.

Analytics for Shopify can track the following important metrics:

• Total sales
• Rate of returning customers
• Create individualized customer profiles
• Indicate where customers click or scroll
• Track where customers enter and exit the sales funnel
• Track correlations between purchases and other site interactions, like leaving reviews
• Provide SEO support for your product listings
• Analyze store loading speed
• Build customer and product segments
• Track how many times an individual seller visits your site
• Conversion rate
• Bounce rate
• Sales attributed to marketing campaigns
• Source of origin for buyers – i.e., ads, organic search

Not every Shopify analytics tool will track all of these. Choose which features are most important to you and implement those apps first.

Let’s start with the most obvious tool – the Shopify analytics tool built directly into the dashboard. It provides some basic data reporting and analytics of your traffic and sales. Shopify Analytics allows you to view several categories of data, including:

• Sales reports
• Consumer profiles
• Product Analytics

Best Features

Since Shopify Analytics is already integrated into your dashboard, it makes sense to use as much functionality as possible. You can produce some helpful basic reports with this tool, like acquisition reports, which track the number of individual visitors to your site, how long they stayed, and whether they are repeat visitors. We also suggest using the conversion rate, and top pages view features as well.

Drawbacks

Keep in mind that higher-tier Shopify memberships come with additional tools. Most of these features are not available with a Shopify Lite subscription, and only half are available with the Shopify Basic subscription. You can see the chart here of features available by subscription type.

Price: Included in your Shopify monthly subscription.

You can install HotJar through your Shopify App Store. This provides you with customer behavior analytics tools that can provide supplemental insights alongside your basic metrics like page views or bounce rate.

Best Features

HotJar is one of the best analytics for Shopify to measure where your customer exits the sales funnel.

In other words, the app tells you on which page customers stopped shopping on your site and navigated to another page. This helps you determine what haltered their buyer’s journey and how to remedy that.

HotJar also supplies heat maps, indicating which areas a user clicked while visiting your site. It also features GDPR compliance options. 

Drawbacks

HotJar serves as a supplement to your existing analytics, not a wholesale Shopify analytics tool replacement. So you should keep in mind that you will likely be managing your HotJar account in addition to other Shopify analytics tools.  

Price: Four pricing tiers, starting at $0/month for Basic up to $389/month. Most businesses opt for the $99/month plan.

Available for a free trial in the Shopify app store, Lucky Orange is one of the most popular Shopify analytics tools out there.

Best Features

Like HotJar, Lucky Orange provides session logs to track how long customers spend on your site, along with heatmaps to see which sections of your website are receiving the most clicks. It also offers Form Analytics, which tracks critical metrics like abandonment and time to start for your online forms.

Lucky Orange exceeds expectations by providing some of the most effective marketing tools along with its solid analytics tool arsenal. The chat function and announcement feature are especially useful in helping customers along and incentivizing a sale.

Drawbacks

Lucky Orange offers 30 days’ worth of data storage to all customers. Increasing the amount to 60- or 90-day lengths require initiating a conversation with customer service and upgrading your account. If clients want to keep larger sets for historical analysis, they must export and store the data externally.

Price: Free plan available, then four pricing tiers available at $10, $20, $50, and $100 per month.

This tool provides Shopify analytics reports on customers and profits along with customized suggestions for continuous improvement. Conversific tracks industry benchmarks and how your business compares on conversion rate, abandonment, page views, and other KPIs.

Best Features

Conversific is a good conversion tracking tool for those who want something easy to set up and monitor. This app is designed to be more plug-and-play than traditional Shopify analytics tools like GA. The conversion tracking tool combines analytic reports with benchmarks and a shop-owner “to-do list.”

The app also provides the ability to produce both customer and product reports. This gives you two different ways to look at the success of your store – by tracking your customer personas and identifying your top-selling and underperforming products.

Drawbacks

Because Conversific is designed to make Shopify analytics easier, it doesn’t allow as much customization as other tools. It’s also a bit pricier than the others we reviewed here.

Price: Free option available, and three pricing tiers at $29, $79, and $199 per month.

There’s no guarantee that customers will magically find your store. Most successful Shopify stores rely upon an ad strategy to promote their products.  Ads get your products in front of the right customers and the most effective Shopify ad tools help you place the ads strategically around the internet.

Though we’ve listed the pricing for the Shopify ad tools we recommend, keep in mind that this does not include your ad budget. That is typically billed as a separate charge from whichever ad channel you are using: Google, Facebook, TikTok, etc.

This all-in-one app lets you design Facebook, Instagram, and Google ads Shopify-dashboard complete. This app allows you to set your ad budget for each channel, and then the AI tool takes overbid amount and retargeting.

Best Features

This is the ideal Shopify ad tool if you want to prioritize the three most popular ad opportunities with as little hassle as possible. It automates ad creation based on your top-performing products and matches those with its AI-generated customer segments. It then positions these ads on the optimal network and time for peak performance. Shopify owners who appreciate automation and prefer to be hands-off choose an ad tool like this – AdScale even creates new Google, and Facebook Business accounts for you.

Drawbacks

Though it does a lot, you will still likely need other apps to manage other ad channels – like TikTok or Pinterest. If you only plan on running Google Ads to get started, you may not use the full functionality of AdScale’s app.

Price: Base service begins at $149 per month. AdScale pricing is based on a sliding scale that charges fees based upon the revenue generated by ads.

Like AdScale, Advoz is a Shopify ad tool that prioritizes the three most popular marketing channels – Google, Facebook, and Instagram. It is distinct in that it connects the store user to a human designer who designs ads and submits them for approval.

Best Features

Advoz is a good pick for store owners who want to prioritize good design in their ads but don’t have graphic design experience themselves. You can work with your designer on either budget-based or product-based terms. Each ad created is manually approved by the store owner before it goes live.

Drawbacks

Because this app generates ads one at a time, it is time-consuming, and there is no automation. Some business owners may prefer to work directly with a designer either in-house or on a freelance basis.

Pricing: Per-ad piece pricing, or four pricing tiers available at $10, $25, $50, and $100 per week.

Between January 2018 and July 2020, TikTok’s user base grew by 116% worldwide and over 780% in the U.S. alone. Integrating TikTok’s ad tool for Shopify is one of the best ways to expand into this volatile market. TikTok recently unveiled its proprietary small business ad app for Shopify, allowing store owners to set ad budgets to create campaigns as they would for Google or Facebook ads.

Best Features

The video generator is unquestionably the most helpful feature of the Shopify ads app. Creating video content the old-fashioned way takes a tremendous amount of time and videography experience. While the video templates are pre-generated and somewhat reminiscent of stock photo libraries, they offer a way to market products on TikTok comparable to Facebook Carousel ads, which have proven successful over time.

The TikTok app also comes with an analytics tracking tool called the Pixel. This reports on TikTok users browsing a page, adding items to a cart, or completing a purchase.

Drawbacks

Because the app is relatively new, the analytics tool is not as fleshed out as perhaps it may become. There is also limited data available on the long-term performance of TikTok ads.

Price: Free

While Shopify does have a free Facebook ads integration available, it is limited to showing only 25 interests for each customer profile. This app allows you to choose broad topics and then offers you hundreds of related goods that may not be immediately evident.

Best Features

This app uses years of Facebook research linking interests that are hard to discern without large datasets. It also takes the burden of analysis off the shoulders of individual store owners. Hidden Interests lets you quickly sort, save, and export relevant interest groups to determine the best target for you. Unlike most Shopify ad apps, Hidden Interests is free. Store owners marketing to non-English speaking audiences will appreciate the ability to research interests in any language.

Drawbacks

While Hidden Interests integrates well with Facebook Ads Manager, it is not a one-stop advertising solution. You will still need a separate app to run your Facebook campaigns and product analytics.

Price: Free