A few months back, we ran down a list of popular ecommerce reporting tools that Littledata integrates with. Today, we’ll take a look at one tool in particular: Segment.

When it comes to data, one thing is clear: every business should be using more of it.

At Littledata, we believe data is your single biggest tool for success, whether it’s breaking down your marketing channel attribution or deciding on a new campaign for your repeat buyers. Not only does data help you nail down what’s working for your store and what’s not right now—it also helps you make decisions for future success.

With a flood of data tools on the market for Shopify stores (data lakes, business intelligence and dashboarding, funnels and segments) the search for the perfect data tool to fit within your tech stack can be overwhelming.

It can also be tough to find a tool with all the right features for the right price. Fashion stores sell differently than coffee subscription stores, so it can be tempting to either build a custom tool yourself or hire an analytics consultant to do the heavy lifting for you.

Maintaining multiple connections and integrations can also become a task in itself. This can lead to data fatigue, causing confusion and even costing you time and money.

But whether or not you use an app for better Shopify tracking or you go with a consultant, one thing is clear for Shopify stores: driving your decision-making with data is no longer optional if you want to succeed in the current ecommerce marketplace.

Plain and simple, accurate data is the best way to ensure you’re getting the maximum ROI for your business.

While our Google Analytics connection is popular among Shopify stores, thousands of Shopify stores (and Littledata customers) use Segment as their main tracking tool, including brands like Nuun, ROMWOD, Kin, Cellucor, and more.

Why do Shopify sellers use Segment?

Segment is a streamlined way to clean, collect, push and pull customer data. The company has raised over $280 million and it continues to grow especially fast in the commerce vertical.

Segment’s Customer Data Infrastructure (CDI) is built around connections, protocols and personas (single user views), and the platform organizes connections in terms of sources and destinations.

In other words, you can think about Segment as a single API for all of your customer data.

As Shopify continues to push features for enterprise ecommerce, you don’t have to be front-page news to take advantage of Segment’s functionality; tons of mid-sized Shopify brands currently use Segment together with Shopify. But why? How do Shopify stores benefit from integrating Segment with their store?

Benefits of connecting Shopify with Segment

1) Capture every customer touchpoint

Littledata’s Segment connection lets you use Shopify as Segment source. In other words, merchants can now automatically track every ecommerce touchpoint on your Shopify store, including:

• User/browsing behaviour
• Checkout steps
• Sales & refunds
• Customer lifetime value (LTV)
• Marketing metrics like customer acquisition cost (CAC)

When merchants integrate Segment with Shopify, no touchpoint in the customer journey goes untracked. This includes multiple checkout steps, sales conversion data and lifetime value (LTV), arguably the holy grail of ecommerce metrics.

What about subscriptions?

If you are a subscription business using ReCharge for your checkout then you’ll understand how difficult it is to attribute your recurring orders back to the original marketing source.

Furthermore it’s hard to keep track of what revenue is coming from first time orders versus recurring revenue. By using Littledata with Segment you can correctly attribute your ReCharge orders including the use of custom dimensions such as order count and  customer LTV as well as lifecycle events such as customer created and subscription cancelled.

For those running a subscription store, the app integrates with ReCharge and Google Analytics so you can track all your subscription data.

It also connects to your Facebook Ads and Google Ads for accurate marketing attribution and customer journey tracking. This way, you know which campaigns are actually working (and maybe more importantly, which ones are not).

2) Server-side tracking for complete accuracy

Speaking of tracking, Littledata’s server-side tracking approach within Google Analytics beats out Shopify’s native reporting platform.

For Segment users, server-side tracking ensures data is 100% reliable, which means better analysis and decision-making.

3) Quick setup

Quick integrations should never be undervalued. Within minutes, Shopify merchants can have their stores armed with a steady data flow in Segment.

Automated ecommerce tracking

Like the popular Google Analytics connection for Shopify stores, Littledata’s Segment connection uses server-side tracking to capture every step in your checkout flow, plus sales, refunds, product variants, and more.

It’s the easiest way to ensure accurate, detailed data about sales and shopping behaviour. In fact, Littledata is the only recommended Segment integration for Shopify and Shopify Plus.

Benefits include:

• Works with any Shopify or Shopify Plus store
• Server-side tracking for 100% accuracy
• Captures every touch point, including checkout steps, sales data and customer lifetime value (LTV)
• Analytics audit to check for accurate tracking

The connection captures what happens on your Shopify store, then pushes that data to Segment so you can send it to hundreds of Segment destinations:

Putting the data to use

So what are some ways you can use this raw data as actionable insights?

• Better marketing automation
• Personalize and hyper-target your campaigns even more
• General ecommerce CRO
• Better reporting and analysis

For example, you can push your Shopify data to tools including Hubspot, Salesforce, Mixpanel and Google Analytics.

Better actionable insights is really why Littledata built a single Shopify connection to be used as a source for Segment.

By centralizing your data with Segment, you can ensure that you have data consistency when using the data across multiple destinations like Google Analytics, Klaviyo, Facebook, Friendbuy and Hotjar.

Not only will this save 100s of development hours building and maintaining multiple integrations, but it also frees you to adapt your data stack for any opportunity, like debugging, testing and reviewing your data collection.

Welcome to a truly smarter solution!

Like we mentioned, Littledata is the only recommended Shopify connector for Segment.

Want to give it a try? Our new 30-day free trials will give you a full month of accurate data so you can feel the difference for yourself.

Our enterprise plans also include the option for custom Segment data audits, setup and reporting. We’re here to help you scale!