WooCommerce Analytics: Maximizing insights for success

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WooCommerce powers over 6.5 million websites worldwide. Yet there’s a common misconception that WooCommerce analytics is too complex for users without technical experience. This is not entirely true.

WooCommerce Analytics is a native tool that allows you to easily track customer behavior, product performance, and more. 

However, growing businesses may need more advanced analytics tools to monitor their store performance. 

In this article, we’ll provide an overview of the WooCommerce Analytics tools and discuss the top three tools that provide robust analytical features. 

Let’s get started. 

WooCommerce Analytics: What do you need to know?

WooCommerce Analytics is a native WooCommerce tool that collects and analyzes data to provide insights into your WooCommerce store performance.

This reporting and analytics tool offers many features to help manage online stores. WooCommerce Analytics tracks the basic metrics and KPIs, but the data may be insufficient for advanced analysis.

Feature-rich plugins for WooCommerce analytics play a crucial role in advanced reporting and analysis. These tools track various metrics vital to measuring your ecommerce business’s growth. 

Tracking such metrics is beneficial for the following:

• Sales performance evaluation: Tracking metrics helps you identify your best and least performing products, so you can see which product needs improvement and which is an asset to your store. 
• Forecasting: Tracking enables you to monitor your marketing campaign’s effectiveness closely. It helps you identify and focus on the best marketing campaigns to boost sales. Based on the sales performance, you can forecast, plan inventory, and prepare sales campaigns ahead of time.
• Customer satisfaction: Tracking metrics helps you better understand your customers’ shopping behavior. Customer behavior analysis enhances user experience and leads to customer satisfaction. 
• Optimize marketing efforts: Tracking enables you to monitor and adapt your strategies to changing marketing trends. It keeps you one step ahead of the competition. 

WooCommerce analytics dashboard

The WooCommerce Analytics dashboard provides a general overview of your store’s performance. It displays information about your customers, coupons, revenue, taxes, and more, presenting analytical reports about your store under three main categories:

• Performance
• Charts
• Leaderboards

The dashboard allows you to analyze and share data for each category using specific presets and advanced filters. You can also customize each dashboard section using a toggle menu. This menu displays the various stats available for each section. 

Here’s an example of the toggle menu:

Now, let’s explore the three categories under the WooCommerce Analytics dashboard. We’ll also discuss how to use them to gather comprehensive data. 

1. Performance 

This section provides data about your store’s performance. The tool displays the values of your selected data for analysis using a percentage and a trend arrow.

The direction of the trend arrow could be upward, downward, or the same. It indicates if your store’s performance has improved, declined, or hasn’t changed significantly within the selected period.

You can choose the data you wish to analyze using the date range picker. You can also compare it with data from a different date range. The date range picker gives you a comprehensive view of your store’s progress. 

Here’s an example of how the WooCommerce Analytics dashboard presents the data: 

2. Charts

This section allows you to visualize your store data using line and bar charts. 

On the WooCommerce Analytics dashboard, you can customize the appearance of the charts using the date range picker. You can also toggle the KPIs like orders, refunds, items sold, etc. 

Here’s an example of how your data might appear in the charts section:

3. Leaderboards

Leaderboards is the third section in the WooCommerce Analytics dashboard. It filters out your best-performing statistics and presents them under four default sub-sections: 

• Top customers – total spend: This indicates your highest paying customers and how much they’ve spent at your store
• Top coupons – number of orders: This displays your most frequently used coupons and how many orders they were applied to
• Top categories – items sold: This shows the top categories with the most orders and the number of items sold in these categories
• Top products – items sold: This shows your best-selling products and highlights the products that customers buy within the specified time frame

This section has a broad customization menu. This allows you to toggle the statistics you’d like to see and reorder them or rename them according to your preferences.

The image below is an example of a WooCommerce Analytics leaderboard section:

WooCommerce Analytics reports

The WooCommerce reports feature provides information about your store’s performance, providing deeper insights into individual areas. 

Below are the individual ecommerce marketing reports on your WooCommerce Analytics platform:

1. Products report: This report provides a comprehensive analysis of the sales performance of each product in your store. It compiles reports of individual products and all products together. Then, it allows you to compare them.

• All products view: This shows the net sales and orders from the products you sold within a specific time frame. The image below is an example of an all-products view report:

• Single product view: This allows you to search for a particular product. It also provides reports on product net sales and the number of orders. Here’s an example of the single-product view:

• Products comparison: This allows you to select a group of products and compare their sales performance in a report like the image below:

2. Orders report: This provides information about your product orders. It allows you to customize the report using advanced filters like refunds, order status, and coupon codes: 

3. Customers report: This report analyzes your customers’ data. It provides specific information like name, average order value, location, total spend, email address, etc:

4. Revenue report: Provides data on your store’s daily revenue. Below is a sample of a revenue report:

5. Taxes report: This provides data on the taxes collected within specified dates. It provides additional details on your tax codes, total taxes, order taxes, and shipping taxes. 

6. Coupons and discount reports: This report compiles data about single and multiple coupons. It also includes discounts available in your store within a certain time frame. 

7. Stock reports: This report is only functional if you enable the stock management feature. It provides data inventory and helps you track depleting stock:

Exporting data from WooCommerce Analytics

You can export data from WooCommerce Analytics manually by downloading it to CSV. This gives you a copy of the data displayed in any given table in CSV format. However, given that data is continually changing, this process can become time-consuming if you want to keep your records up to date.

To solve this, you need a third-party tool or plugin that will automatically extract data and transfer it for you. You can do this on Google Sheets using the in-built import tool.

On your WooCommerce store, go to Admin Panel -> WooCommerce -> Google Sheet and then -> Integration.

Click the Get Code button, then authorize the plugin through your Google Sheets account. You can then enter the code to complete the process.

If you have any issues, there are other tools to make the process even easier, including Coupler, Zapier and WP Fusion.

What metrics and KPIs you should track

Knowing which metrics and KPIs to monitor is crucial when using WooCommerce Analytics. Here are some of the most important ones to help you understand your store better:

• Sales: WooCommerce Analytics provides information about your sales prices. It gives data on gross sales, total sales, and net sales. The formula for calculating the total sales is [Gross Sales – Returns – Coupons + Taxes + Shipping]
• Product orders: It provides data on the number of new orders you receive within a specific period. This includes your average order value and the number of items sold
• Discounts: It provides data on the number of discounted orders your store offers. It also displays your ecommerce store’s net coupon discount
• Tax: It provides tax information, including total tax, order tax, and shipping tax. The formula for calculating the total tax is [Order Tax + Shipping Tax]
• Shipping: It includes details on the shipping fees associated with each purchase, refund, or returned product

Additional plugins for WooCommerce analytics

WooCommerce Analytics is an excellent tool for monitoring your store’s basic performance. However, we recommend supplementing it with additional WooCommerce plugins for more robust features.

A comprehensive analysis of all facets of your ecommerce store is necessary for accurate insights. To see more valuable customer insights, like purchase behavior, it becomes important to use additional analytical plugins. 

Below are some WooCommerce analytics plugins that provide a comprehensive view of your ecommerce store:

Advanced WC Analytics

This plugin offers in-depth analytics and reports about product list performance, as well as shopping behavior, checkout behavior, and more. 

One benefit of using this plugin is its comparatively easy setup process. Here are some of Advanced WC Analytics’ key features:

Key features

• Seamless WooCommerce Google Analytics integration 
• Provides real-time reports on engagement traffic, user interaction, and other insightful data 
• Uses Google user ID to give you deeper insights on your customers’ buying behaviors
• Integrates with Google Optimize to enable you to carry out A/B testing on your website easily

Pricing

• Individual Pro: $14.99 per month (one website license)
• Professional Pro: $19.99 per month (two website licenses) 
• Agency Pro: $24.99 per month (three website licenses) 

Omnisend

Omnisend is an all-in-one email marketing plugin and SMS marketing tool. It has extensive built-in analytics and dashboards.

The tool enhances your WordPress analytics to provide comprehensive business insights. Omnisend presents these insights in many formats, such as graphs, charts, and data widgets. 

Omnisend’s advanced reporting automatically sorts your best-performing metrics into well-structured lists. With this, you can quickly skip tedious data mapping and receive well-organized reports. Thus, it saves you time and human resources.

Omnisend’s reporting tools provide a comprehensive view of your store’s performance, and filter the WooCommerce statistics according to marketing channels and time frames.

The tool helps you easily spot trends and make data-driven decisions to boost sales and scale your business.

Key features 

• Centralized campaign and automation performance dashboards. They streamline ecommerce marketing reports, making them easier to analyze
• Revenue attribution and reporting. This helps you closely track and compare your WooCommerce sales traffic 
• Built-in message reports to optimize workflow
• Cross-channel tracking features, to closely track the results from your marketing strategies across various touchpoints 
• Reporting dashboard to track customized data and trends 
• Advanced email tracking tools to assess the effectiveness of your email campaigns based on the recipient’s domain 
• Cookies tracking for accurate information on your campaign revenue

Pricing 

• Free
• Standard: Starts at $16/month 
• Pro: Starts at $59/month

Conversios

This unique ecommerce analytics and marketing tool has various functions. These include fast data tracking, campaign management, sales performance tracking, and more. 

This plugin helps ecommerce store owners track and improve sales performance features, like Google tag managers, ads tracking, etc. 

Key features

• Closely monitors conversions, using specialized conversion APIs
• Provides conversion tracking for purchase, add-to-cart, and checkout
• Uses Google Analytics 4 to track and record ecommerce activities in real-time 
• Leverages ad tracking to optimize campaign return on ad spend (ROAS) and sales campaigns 
• Gives you AI-powered insights on your sales metrics that help you make data-driven decisions 

Pricing

• Starter: $198/year
• Professional: $398/year
• Enterprise: $798/year 

Wrap up

Running a successful ecommerce store requires an in-depth understanding of your store’s performance. WooCommerce Analytics is a valuable tool for tracking your store’s performance and provides comprehensive data and reports. 

For further insights, you can enhance your WooCommerce analytics with plugins like Omnisend. Omnisend is an excellent tool for SMS marketing, email automation, and other marketing strategies. 

By combining both tools, you’ll have the tools to build better customer relationships, increase sales, and learn from your new insights.

WooCommerce Analytics FAQs

Does WooCommerce have analytics?

Yes — WooCommerce has a dedicated Analytics platform with nine reports plus tools for filtering and segmenting. 

How to activate WooCommerce Analytics

WooCommerce Analytics is already activated for all live WooCommerce sites. Simply click on the Analytics tab to get started.

What are the capabilities of WooCommerce Analytics?

WooCommerce Analytics provides reports on products, orders, customers, revenue, taxes, discounts, and stock. These are summarized in the dashboards as performance trends, charts, and leaderboards — including top customers and top products.

How do I pull data from WooCommerce Analytics?

You can download data to a CSV file directly through WooCommerce Analytics, but this can be laborious if you want to keep data up to date. Google Sheets has an in-built import function that can automatically update data, or you can use third-party tools like Coupler, Zapier, and WP Fusion.