To run a business that makes real money online, you have to wear many hats: site admin, chief stockkeeper, finance wizard, head of logistics, client mind-reader…
About the last one. Seeing success in your tea leaves?
If you’re struggling to figure out what motivates your customers, it may be time to try WooCommerce Analytics.
This powerful tool delivers loads of insightful data from your WooCommerce store. The numbers can be pretty revealing, helping you to get the upper hand over the competition.
Keen to give it a go? Let’s start the guided tour!
What Is WooCommerce Analytics Exactly?
Oh, you want a more detailed answer.
Essentially, WooCommerce Analytics is a free data analysis tool built for people like you and me. (Assuming you don’t have a degree in statistics).
It’s designed to help business owners to understand:
- Which products are selling.
- What people are ordering.
- How much revenue is coming in.
- Which coupons and discounts are being used.
And plenty more. These features are available straight after you install WooCommerce on your WordPress website. There it is, in the side menu of your WordPress admin area:
If the term “attribution” gets you all hot and flustered, there’s also a separate beta extension called WooCommerce Analytics.
This lets you track:
- How customers come to your WooCommerce store.
- Which devices they are using while browsing the virtual shelves.
- Which of your marketing campaigns attract their attention.
Hot damn!
Why WooCommerce Analytics Is Great for Small Businesses
You might be happy just watching the money roll in. We can picture you now, smoking a cigar and stroking a white cat as you slowly rotate on your surprisingly ergonomic evil mastermind office chair.
But actually, WooCommerce Analytics has some slightly more practical applications. You can use insights from this tool to:
- Refine your product selection: Performance data shows what’s selling like hotcakes and what needs to go on clearance.
- Adapt your site for a better customer experience: Figure out why your customers are spending less than you’d like.
- Improve your marketing: Once you understand the full customer journey, it’s way easier to make highly targeted campaigns.
- Upgrade your inventory management: Avoid overstocking or understocking to reduce your overheads.
And this is just a quick sample. We’ll look more closely at applying insights to real-world scenarios a little later.
WooCommerce Analytics 101: Understanding Your Dashboard
To access WooCommerce Analytics, you’ll need a website running on WordPress 5.3 or higher with the free WooCommerce plugin installed.
Got that? Perfect, let’s start exploring.
Begin by navigating to Analytics > Overview within your WordPress admin area.
Wow, there’s a lot going on here.
Don’t worry, it’s pretty straightforward once you know what you’re looking at. WooCommerce Analytics has a whole heap of options, but we can divide them into three categories:
- Performance indicators – Key metrics such as sales, refunds, and orders.
- Charts – Visualize your data with customizable line and bar charts.
- Leaderboards – Highlighting your most important KPIs.
The controls here are fairly simple: you use the drop-down selector at the top to choose your date range and watch the numbers change.
If you want to change the figures that show up on your “Overview” dashboard, click the three dots in the top-right corner of each section.
But this area is really just an at-a-glance dashboard. WooCommerce Analytics goes much deeper.
Tap on any of the boxes, and you’ll be whisked away into the individual stats pages. These include…
Products
Look to your left and select Analytics > Products from the sidebar menu.
On this page, you can see a graph of items sold, sales, and orders. Drop-down menus at the top allow you to select your date range and the type of products you want to study.
Scroll down, and you’ll discover a complete list of sales. Here, you can sort the data by tapping any header.
Revenue
It’s business time. Navigate to Analytics > Revenue in the sidebar menu, and behold your empire.
You can use the data range selector and tap on any of these panels to see the data pop up on the chart.
Further down, you have a day-by-day breakdown of your revenue.
Orders
Here’s where things get really interesting. Under Analytics > Orders, you have a collection of tools that can reveal every aspect of how your customers shop.
At the top of the page, you can choose specific currencies to focus on. And in the next drop-down box, we have the option “Advanced Filters.”
This allows you to drill down into the minutiae of order data, from customer type to tax rate.
And of course, you have a full list of orders that match your selections at the bottom of the page.
More Options
Take a glance at the sidebar. Below “Orders,” you’ll see several more options: “Variations,” “Categories,” “Coupons,” “Taxes,” and “Downloads.”
All of these dashboards work similarly — you choose a date range, narrow down your products, and then admire the data.
Before we finish this whistlestop tour, there is one more tab: “Stock.” This dashboard gathers data from WooCommerce’s stock management feature, helping you check inventory across your SKUs at a glance.
5 WooCommerce Analytics Metrics You Really Need To Track
If you’re the kind of person who gets a kick out of seeing gross sales, taxes, and refunds, these dashboards are fun to browse.
But if you’re trying to extract some useful information from the data, we recommend focusing on some key metrics.
- Average order value (AOV): Every business wants to increase the average amount a customer spends per transaction. By tracking your AOV over time, you can figure out how your decisions are affecting purchase behavior. You can find this metric in the “Orders” dashboard.
- Revenue growth: Is your revenue growing or falling over time? You’d probably prefer the former. To find out how your store is performing, visit the “Revenue” area and use the date range picker to compare current and previous periods.
- Best-selling products: This is where you’re making money. It might be worth doubling down. Head to the “Products dashboard,” and sort the main list by “Items Sold.” Want more detail? Apply the same sorting in the “Variations” dashboard to see which sizes, colors, and other variants are your most popular.
- Products with the highest returns: Of course, making a sale is only half the equation. To find out which products are actually generating cold hard cash for your business, you’ll need to visit “Orders” and sort by “Net Sales.”
- Low-performing items: Struggling to shift certain products? See which items are weighing down your inventory by heading to “Orders,” and inverse sorting by “Items Sold.”
We recommend checking these metrics every three months to keep your finger on the pulse!
Using Insights From WooCommerce Analytics To Boost Your Business
Some insights from metrics are pretty clear. If bright yellow size 9 Crocs are selling well on your website, you know where to invest (remember, profit before taste).
But there are other, less obvious insights that you can draw from your WooCommerce data. Below, we’ve included some real-world examples.
Stock Management
Storage is expensive, so it makes sense to keep your inventory lean. Find products that are selling slowly or piled high in your warehouse, and reduce your stock.
On the flip side, look at seasonal trends from previous years to determine which products have been popular, and stock up in advance.
Customer Experience
Sometimes, visitors will start shopping, add items to their carts…and then just leave. It’s often because they’ve become frustrated by the experience of shopping in your store.
Monitor how many customers are doing this under “Orders.” Look for orders with the status “Abandoned.” If the number is alarming, you might need to make improvements.
Marketing Optimization
While WooCommerce Analytics doesn’t have attribution built in, you can still use the tool to rate your marketing efforts.
Say you’re pushing a particular product through social ads. Sales for that product should go up, right? If you don’t see an uptick, you might need to take a different approach.
Product Strategy
Of course, marketing might not be your issue — you might just need to refine your offerings.
That could mean changing your pricing or serving up a different mix of products. Whenever you experiment, keep an eye on the sales for individual products and SKUs. This data can be very revealing!
More Analytics Tools for WooCommerce
While WooCommerce Analytics has some useful features, it misses important data. To fill in those gaps, it’s worth adding some more analytics tools to your e-commerce website.
The easiest way to do this is by visiting the WooCommerce Marketplace.
This emporium of extensions has loads of great add-ons.
Here’s the menu:
WooCommerce Analytics Beta
This extension adds beta features to WooCommerce Analytics. That means it’s not super reliable yet — but it’s still useful.
The main feature here is order attribution. In other words, you can track where customers are coming from. The tool covers social channels, referrals, devices, marketing campaigns, and more.
And that means you can set up loads more metrics.
Price: Free
Google Analytics for WooCommerce
Another official extension, this one lets you explore store data via your Google Analytics account.
This opens up yet more data points, from cart actions to product views. With this level of detail, you can really start understanding customer behavior.
Price: Free
Google Analytics Pro for WooCommerce
Hungry for even more data? This premium analytics plugin gives you an amazing selection of metrics to play with. You can even track individual behaviors, like someone clicking an email, logging in to your site, and progressing through the various stages of checkout.
It’s heaven for WooCommerce nerds.
Price: $79 per year subscription
Start Learning More About Your Store
You don’t need to be an Einstein of e-commerce to make money online. It’s really about trying stuff out and seeing what works. And WooCommerce Analytics provides an easy way to track your successes (and failures).
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