Comparing 3 time ranges in Google Analytics

At Littledata, we believe Google Analytics (GA) is one of the best free tools out there. Google Analytics is a great platform to access detailed data about your Shopify store’s user behaviour and sales performance. Regardless of your industry, as long as your Shopify store is in business, you need a platform where you can monitor your marketing performance and identify ways to increase your conversions.   Google Analytics is the one of the most popular analytics platforms for a few reasons: It’s free. It can show nearly any metric you want to track, straight out of the box. But with a lot of data comes a lot of complexity. Even for experienced analysts, Google Analytics can be a hurdle at times. Your Shopify data needs constant monitoring since it's the single biggest factor in your marketing and sales decisions. And who better to do that than proven Google Analytics consultants! What to expect from a GA expert A Google Analytics expert will (or should) always know what to look for and where to find it, even before opening GA.  Why? Because they’ve learned through experience to take the time and think through the data insights merchants need most. [tip]Here's what you should expect from a Google Analytics expert[/tip] On the other hand, if you’re taking the self-learning path and tackling GA by yourself, you’re really trying to achieve two things at the same time: become a web analyst and learn the GA platform. But are either of those time-efficient tasks to help grow your store? Probably not. Here's another thing: while a Google Analytics expert will help you make sense of your Shopify data, it's the digital implementation specialist who ensures you have the right Enhanced Ecommerce Conversion (EEC) data in your GA dashboard in the first place.  Whether your EEC tracking will be implemented via GTM or other tools, the end game is the same: Get me the correct data in GA. And for this, Shopify and Shopify Plus stores are in luck — Littledata automates the EEC tracking so you don’t have to. Why get an expert? If Littledata automates tracking, why is it necessary to hire an expert? For things like Day to day checks on basic metrics like revenue and transactions Basic campaign monitoring for Facebook Ads, Google Ads, etc. For the most part, you can do these on your own. But a tool like Littledata provides the raw data in Google Analytics for much more granular insights, and that’s where a GA expert will come in handy. Here's an example: With every transaction, Littledata accurately sends to Google Analytics a set of raw properties (e.g. Shopify CustomerID, TransactionID and campaign parameters).  For this data, a Google Analytics expert will be able to link the source or campaign path with customerID’s and transactionID’s in a custom report. This custom report will show the true return on ad spend (ROAS) based on different attribution models. Determining which conversions are linked to a first interaction or an assisted interaction will help you measure and optimize your marketing campaigns with more accuracy. [tip]Find out the real ROAS of your Facebook Ads for your Shopify store[/tip] Metrics that matter One of the main metrics marketers want to know is Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) per channel. If you get that right, you’ll know exactly where to increase your marketing spend. And in doing so, you’ll probably acquire more customers for about the same fixed budget.  A GA expert will be able to gather your (true) marketing costs from all your marketing campaigns over a given time period, and calculate the amounts by channel. This sounds easy, but things can get a bit more complicated when you're trying to find the CAC based on each attribution model. By now you should know your ROAS and CAC, but what about customer lifetime value (LTV)? In other words, you should know how much $$$ your marketing leads are spending with you, what your acquisition cost is per customer, and where to find the highest converting leads. But do you know how much time they are spending with your brand? Which channels are bringing the stickiest clients? Which channels bring the most repeat purchases (or subscriptions)? LTV is one of the most coveted metrics for ecommerce managers. A GA expert will help you calculate LTV by summing up the gross profit from all historic transactions for each individual customer, then splitting those conversions by channel and calculating the median for each.  And if you want things laid out for you in plain english, at Littledata we provide the necessary custom dimensions you need to accurately calculate LTV.  So what's the verdict? For Shopify merchants, Littledata is one of the best solutions to ensure reliable data for accurate marketing attribution and buyer behaviour. And since your Shopify store already needs fixing when it comes to data collection, an enterprise plan (with full support and a dedicated team of Google Analytics consultants) just may be an answer to your prayers.  With Littledata enterprise, get all the analytics support you’ll ever need, for a fraction of the cost to hire an experienced Google Analytics consultant. Get in touch with our team today to see how an enterprise plan can accelerate your path to scale! 🚀

On February 4th, Google Analytics removed two standard dimensions from reporting – Service Provider and Network Domain – and replaced them with the dreaded (not set) label. Although there’s been cries of anguish from some analytics companies, my view is that Google has sound reasons to remove the dimensions – and there are ways around many of the limitations. Shortly after Google added the above alert to the hover tip within the Google Analytics interface, data in reports stopped reporting the information. Moving forward (and unless Google reverses course on this decision in the coming days), you’re going to start seeing (not set) under the Service Provider and Network Domain dimensions: What are Service Provider and Network Domain? Every time a visitor is tracked on your website, Google captures the IP address in order to geolocate the user (generating Country, State and City dimensions). It also does a reverse DNS lookup to see which networks this IP address is linked with. Service Provider is either the ISP (for a consumer) or the corporate network (for a business internet user). Network Domain is the main domain by which the traffic was routed (e.g. Verizon, Amazon AWS etc.) So why did Google drop them? There’s been no official announcement from Google, but it’s likely to be a combination of three factors. CCPA Storing of any California consumer’s network details is a violation of the California Consumer Protection Act (CCPA). This is much more specific than previous regulations, and as a California-headquarted company, Google wants to stay safely within the law. [tip]Here's everything Shopify merchants need to know about CCPA compliance[/tip] Fingerprinting Even if the Service Provider itself is not identifiable to any individual, it may well be used to generate a unique fingerprint for an individual user, in combination with other dimensions in Google Analytics (browser version, operating system, screen size, pages visited, etc.). Fingerprinting is user identification by covert means, and as such Google also wants to clamp down on in. Lack of usage In ten years of advising high-growth businesses on Google Analytics setup, I've never seen a good use for these reports. Google tracks what are the most common reports used, and apparently they were already flagged for deprecation based on lack of usage.  How the change affects your Shopify tracking Some analytics companies (and agencies) are worried about this change for a few reasons : Reason 1: Service Provider and Network Domain dimensions helped filter out spam and bot traffic, which meant less legwork for those doing the reporting. It was easier to sniff out bounce rates that looked too high (or low) to be "real". Take the screenshot below — which Service Provider do you think is probably legitimate and which one is probably a bot/spam? In short, most analytics companies would say before this change, it was easy to uncover bots/spam, and now it's not. Reason 2: Some larger stores used Server Provider and Network Domain dimensions as a quick & easy way to filter out internal traffic from monthly reports. And unfortunately, this change has killed these dimensions' ability to filter. Reason 3: Companies such as Leadfeeder and Leadberry used the Network Domain, plus a database of which companies and people used that domain, to offer a list of sales leads who visited your site. They can mostly work around the limitations by getting their clients to push another tracking script on the site, and looking up IP address themselves — which is OK, providing your website visitors are aware you are doing this in your terms and conditions. In other words, if you're filtering your GA views by network provider, it's possible you'll see internal traffic in your reporting this month. And it might not be obvious, since it's mixed in with all of your site traffic. That is, unless you look at the GA data with better tracking. How can you work around this? For those that really need the lost dimensions there are two solutions: Use Google Tag Manager and an IP lookup service to pass network onto Google Analytics as a custom dimension. Use the recently launched ipmeta.io service to do this. CAVEAT: I haven't tried this service myself, and i'm suspicious of all products which are 'free forever' - if you're not paying for the product, you are the product! What now? For some stores using Google Analytics, this sudden change will go unnoticed and won't really impact reporting. For stores that rely on these dimensions to filter out bots/spam and internal traffic for more accurate reporting, the loss of these dimensions will have somewhat of a negative impact. Of course, we'll continue to monitor these changes (and any other surprises that Google may have in store). Don't pay too much attention to the initial outcry — every change has a solution. Littledata users can rest easy — with our Google Analytics app for Shopify, your tracking won't be impacted by these dimensions. You'll continue to see accurate data for better reporting. 🚀