E-commerce merchants have geared up for Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM). The busiest shopping season in countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia will kick-start from November 25. According to a blog published by Shopify, the total sales made by Shopify merchants during 2021 BFCM was $6.3 billion. Surprisingly, most of them were independent merchants. As the holiday sales is approaching, store owners are marketing rigorously. However, tracking your holiday performance is as important as it is to perform.
Shopify makes it easy for merchants to measure their performance. Shopify analytics allow store owners to monitor, track and analyse performance so that better decisions can be made. It not only helps in understanding how you fared this year but you can also compare and make decisions accordingly for next year as well.
Shopify Analytics Live View: Track Performance in Real Time
Tracking real time performance of your store is the best way to optimise marketing and promotional campaigns. Live View from Shopify Analytics allows you to do that helping merchants make proactive and informed business decisions. How’s that possible? Well, Live View allows you to track your buyer’s behaviour throughout the checkout process. And you know what the best part is, the data is accessible from anywhere and any device in store’s local time.
Shopify analytics Live View will help merchants to uncover crucial insights around checkout, visitors, traffic, sales and key metrics. One can see number of visitors on their site at a particular time and their location as well. It also allows you to keep a tab on your purchase funnel as buyers add items to their carts, go through the entire checkout process and make purchase from your store successfully. You can track daily total visits, order, pageviews and sales across the channels. Merchants can even see their top-performing products along with highest-grossing geographies.
Live View is best for high traffic periods such as Black Friday Cyber Monday as it allows you to monitor results immediately. Hence, you can check the impact of your latest marketing efforts and promotional campaigns. Monitor what’s working and what’s not helps in boosting performance in long run.
Pre-built Date Ranges To Filter Reports
While comparing performance, one has to constantly switch back and forth manually between different date ranges. This makes the reporting a tedious task. Here is when Shopify’s pre-selected date ranges for Black Friday Cyber Monday within Shopify Analytics reporting comes to rescue. With pre-selected date ranges, one can easily and instantly compare key metrics with last periods, benchmark performance and plan next move confidently.
Customer Cohort Analysis: Know Your Customers
Lately, Shopify upgraded customer cohort analysis and this was informed by Shopify President Harley Finkelstein on Twitter. Announcing the same, he wrote, “Recently, we made a major upgrade to our analytics that was a top merchant request: Cohort analysis. Huge clutch for merchants to understand their customers ahead of the busiest shopping season of the year.”.
“3 reasons this is huge for merchants Find your most [& least] valuable customer cohorts & engage them with the right campaigns. Identify which activities resonate most with your most valuable cohorts so you can 10x and improve retention. Understand customer churn,” he wrote in another tweet.
What is Cohort Analysis?
Let’s dig deeper. Cohort means a group of people (read buyers) with similar characteristics. Shopify analytics’ customer cohort analysis reports provides merchants a clear picture of customer acquisition and retention rates. The data can be used to know the most valuable customers (those who have made repeated purchases) during Black Friday Cyber Monday. They can later be reengaged with coupon codes and offers.
Merchants can also analyse retention rate variations for different cohorts and then make a comparison with last holiday sales. This will help them to plan for the next holiday sales in a better way. Store owners can even check their buyers’ average sales expenditure during the BFCM weekend.
To prepare customer cohort analysis report, Shopify group customers together on the basis of date they placed their first order. The report can be used to identify most valuable customers and customers of lower value. Engaging with existing customers and nurturing that relationship is easier and cost-effective than finding new customers. These efforts by merchants also increases Average Order Value (AOV) and lifetime value besides improving customer loyalty. The customer cohort analysis includes cohort analysis table, retention rate chart and analysis details.
What Cohort Analysis Shows?
Cohort analysis table which shows data about a customers’ repeat purchases. Retention rate chart shows retention rate of all the first-time customers during a particular time period displayed by the report. You can even compare it with previous periods. Cohort analysis details can be accessed by clicking on the time period in cohort column. Merchants get to know the following key metrics for each customers group:
- Total number of new customers that make up the cohort
- Total expenditure by the cohort till the present date
- The cohort’s average order value
- Average total amount spent by each customer
- Top geographic locations of customers in the cohort
Predicted Spend Tier report is also available for use. It displays the predicated value of each customer in a particular cohort. This report can be used to engage customers that comprise highest value cohorts. Merchants get information such as customer name, email subscription status, predicted spend tier and other data about customer’s spend behaviour.
ShopifyQL Notebooks: Analyze Cross-Domain Performance (It’s A Bonus)
ShopifyQL Notebooks is a dedicated space where merchants can access store data on orders, products and sales. It presents an overall view of your store’s performance, thus helping merchant make well-informed business decisions. ShopifyQL Notebooks enables merchants to bring metrics together from different business domains. Store owners can explore, visualise and analyse data in a better way with the help of ShopifyQL Notebooks.
Announcing the availability of ShopifyQL Notebooks, Shopify President Harley Finkelstein emphasised the importance of data saying that it forms the centrepiece of decision-making in business. He wrote that the new product would help merchants to make wise use of data.
“Data is the centrepiece of business decision-making, and ShopifyQL Notebooks will make it simpler and faster for our merchants to generate insights from data. So excited this product is now available to @ShopifyPlus merchants,” he wrote on Twitter.
Data is the centrepiece of business decision-making, and ShopifyQL Notebooks will make it simpler and faster for our merchants to generate insights from data.
— Harley Finkelstein (@harleyf) November 9, 2022
So excited this product is now available to @ShopifyPlus merchants. https://t.co/pj4vQt7whV
What is BFCM?
The Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) is the most popular shopping time in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. The holiday sales will begin from November 25, the day next to Thanksgiving, and continue up to Cyber Monday that falls on November 28 this year.
Will BFCM 2022 be impacted by inflation? As quoted by cityam.com, EMEA Managing Director at Shopify Shimona Mehta said, “They [ British shoppers] are looking right now to spend on really great, high quality and durable goods, as they look towards needing to scale back on spending next year as we get into a tougher economic time”.
According to a survey released by LoyaltyLion, despite inflation, a majority of Americans are waiting for BFCM. Charlie Casey, CEO of LoyaltyLion, said, “The cost of living crisis is now front and center for many American consumers, significantly impacting shopping behaviors. Our research shows there will be a huge appetite for BFCM this year – consumers worried about rising costs are already thinking ahead about how to take advantage of the popular shopping period. However, this doesn’t mean they’re willing to let go of their values, and despite the worst squeeze on incomes in years, our findings reveal that consumers will be looking for brands they can really trust – they won’t be dictated to by price and deals alone.”
