There's never been a better time to grow a subscription-based business. But the landscape is also more competitive than ever. How do you rise above the noise and obtain devoted subscribers? With our new ReCharge report pack, any recurring-product business can get advanced analytics to help obtain a devoted subscriber base. It's the latest addition to our automated packages of analytics reports. The new pack includes a curated selection of reports proven to help subscription-based ecommerce sites get more traffic and increase recurring revenue. Each report automatically pulls relevant data from your Google Analytics account and turns it into actionable reports, with essential tables and smart visualisations. Growth of subscription-based businesses From vitamin supplements to hacker boxes, product subscription companies are on the rise. Getting products in the mail every month is a huge chunk of the future of ecommerce. According to the Subscription Trade Association (SUBTA), the subscription box industry alone is on track to generate more than $90 billion in annual revenues in the coming decade. SUBTA itself was only formed a little over a year ago, coalescing around this exciting new ecommerce community, and their first events have all sold out. Entrepreneurs who want a piece of subscription industry growth need to optimise every part of the customer life cycle. You don't just need more traffic, you need better-quality traffic. And you don't just need to improve the user experience (UX) on your site, you need to create an engaging customer experience (CX) that drives conversions, brand devotion and upsells. Sounds easy, right? Think again. Luckily there are solutions like ReCharge and Littledata that work out of the box to help you run and optimise a subscription business. What's in the new report pack Our popular ReCharge integration was built to give subscription-based companies accurate marketing attribution for signups and sales in their Shopify stores, but it's quickly grown to be even more detailed, offering deep analytics across the subscription customer life cycle. Automatically connecting marketing campaigns to recurring payments is just the beginning. The first ReCharge report pack makes it easy to keep tabs on where your customers are coming from, the balance between new signups and recurring payments, and how different subscription plans are contributing to revenue. The pack contains a general overview widget plus four key reports for digging deeper into recurring revenue. Which marketing campaigns are driving the most first-time purchases? Is organic search outperforming your PPC campaigns? Is revenue per recurring purchase growing at a steady rate? Those are questions with answers. The ReCharge report pack will help you: Get a concise overview of weekly performance Increase marketing ROI with a clear understanding of how different channels and campaigns are contributing to customer growth Build a sustainable subscription business by optimising revenue segments and payment solutions The Reports tab in your Littledata dashboard automatically shows all relevant report packs, so check them out today and reach out if you have any questions. The ReCharge pack pairs well with our Basics pack, which includes essential reports on site performance and user behaviour. PS: Still waiting to try our Shopify reporting app? Don't delay! We have a plan for every sized business, and ReCharge integration is free!

For two decades the ecommerce customer journey has stayed roughly the same. Customers browse, add to cart, checkout, and then see a page confirming their purchase: the 'thank you' page. That last step is changing, and this is no small change as it threatens to break how many sites measure purchases. Ecommerce stores that stop using a final 'thank you' page without adjusting their analytics setup accordingly are in danger of getting inaccurate purchase data, or even losing track of shoppers altogether. In order to help our customers get ahead of the curve, we've gone through a number of test cases to find short and long term fixes to this issue. But first, a little history. In the old days... In the early days of ecommerce the biggest barrier during checkout was trust. Retailers paid to be certified as ‘hack-proof’ and customers wanted to make quite sure when and how their money was taken. Fast forward twenty years to today, and in the developed world most consumers have transacted online hundreds of times. They are familiar with the process, expect a seamless user experience, and confident that when they click 'buy' their payment will be taken and the products delivered. Online shoppers are so confident, in fact, that an increasing number we observe don’t even bother waiting for that ‘thank you for your order’ page. That page is becoming redundant for three reasons: Almost every checkout process captures an email address to send an order receipt to, and the email acts as a better type of confirmation: one that can be searched and referenced. Seriously, when was the last time you opted to ‘print the confirmation page’ for your records? Many retailers are forced to compete with the superb customer support offered by Amazon. This includes refunds for products that were ordered in error, and quick handling of failed payments. So from a customer's perspective there’s little point in waiting for the confirmation page when any issues will be flagged up later. Which leads to the third reason: as retailers improve the speed of checkout, the payment confirmation step is often the slowest, and so the one where customers are most likely to drop out on a slow mobile connection. This is no small issue, as mobile revenues are expected to overtake desktop revenues for ecommerce businesses globally this year. What does this mean for ecommerce sites? The issue is that for many sites the linking of sales to marketing campaigns is measured by views of that ‘thank you' page. In the marketing analysis, a ‘purchase’ is really a view of that 'thank you' page - or an event recorded on the customer’s browser with the sale. If customers don’t view the page, then no sale is recorded. If you have ever been frustrated by the lack of consistency between Google Analytics and your own payment/back-end records, this is the most likely issue. A dependency on viewing the 'thank you' page brings other problems too: a buggy script, perhaps from another marketing tag, will block the recording of sales. This is another source of the type of analytics inaccuracy which the Littledata app combats automatically. How to adjust your ecommerce tracking The short-term fix is to tweak the firing order of marketing tags on the 'thank you' page, so that even customers who see the page for fractions of a second will be recorded. Sites with a large number of marketing tags will have the greatest room for improvement. But in the long term, as this trend continues, the analytics solution is to link the marketing campaigns to the actual payments taken. This removes the need for the customer to see any type of 'thank you' or confirmation page, and also removes discrepancies between what your marketing platform tells you was purchased and what actually got bought. This is known as server-side tracking. The good news for those of you on the Shopify platform is that our Shopify reporting app does this already - and solves a lot of other analytics problems in one install. For those on other stores, please do contact us for advice. The Littledata team has worked with ecommerce businesses to set up integrations with Magento, DemandWare and numerous custom platforms. Not only can we help fix your analytics setup for accurate tracking, but our app then automates the audit and reporting process for all of your sites going forward.

Here at Littledata we believe that everyone should have access to professional-level analytics tools for tracking, reporting, and improving sales and engagement. That's why we built the ultimate Shopify reporting app. Shopify is one of the best ecommerce platforms on the planet, but their standard analytics are extremely limited. Even if you have a Shopify Plus plan with Acquisition and Behaviour reports, this default reporting misses out on essential metrics for understanding how to improve sales and conversions on your site. How can you expect to improve marketing ROI without marketing-channel attribution for every type of sale in your store? How can you expect to increase sales without a clear picture of shopping cart behaviour? And how can you grow a business unless you understand what share of your sales comes from repeat buying versus new customers? Here's a table detailing what you can track with the Littledata Shopify app: Shopify's Standard Tracking vs Littledata for Shopify Standard Tracking in Shopify The Littledata Shopify App  Essentials Transaction volumes in Shopify match volumes in Google Analytics  ✓ Sales attribution to the source of the visit (marketing channels and other sources)  ✓ Track what pages users see  ✓  ✓ Demographics tracking (age group, interests, etc.)  ✓  Ecommerce behaviour Track what lists are viewed divided by category  ✓ Track the product position in a list  ✓ Track the clicks on products in a list  ✓ Track the product page views  ✓  ✓ Track what products are added to cart  ✓  ✓ Track what products are viewed in the cart  ✓ Analyse the data by product variants (colour, size, etc.) ✓ Track checkout steps (cart, billing, shipping, payment)  ✓ Analyse what order coupons / discount codes perform best  ✓  ✓  Recurring payments Track ReCharge renewals  ✓ Differentiate ReCharge sales from normal sales  ✓  Extra accuracy Deduct returns from total transactions  ✓ Track in Google Analytics by User ID from Shopify  ✓ Exclude traffic from payment gateways like paypal.com  ✓ Exclude spam traffic from Google Analytics data set  ✓ Capture on-site search terms  ✓ Store currency matches Google Analytics currency  ✓ Store timezone matches Google Analytics timezone  ✓ The Littledata app makes all of this remarkably easy. It guides you through the correct Google Analytics setup for your Shopify store, then provides curated reports and analytics to help you make sense of your new stream of reliable data. You don't have to be a Google Analytics expert to use Littledata's Shopify app. In fact, the app works best for product and marketing teams that are eager to learn about the big power of little data. We simplify the setup process and streamline the reporting process. It's that simple. Try it today for free in the reporting section of the Shopify App Store and see for yourself!  

We're excited to announce that Littledata's Shopify app now integrates seamlessly with ReCharge! The integration makes it easy to get an accurate data stream about your ReCharge subscriptions in Google Analytics. What is ReCharge? ReCharge is the most popular recurring billing solution for Shopify stores. It lets you easily sell subscriptions on a Shopify store. ReCharge has a robust feature set for stores selling physical products on subscription, allowing for single product, mixed cart & entire cart subscriptions. The app powers thousands of stores processing tens of thousands of orders daily, including Littledata customers like Tiege Hanley skin care and BIOHM probiotics. Until we built this new integration, ReCharge customers didn't have a way to get a complete data collection in Google Analytics without hiring expensive GA consultants. How the integration works Integrating Littledata with ReCharge lets you capture data about the entire subscriber journey, from marketing campaigns to first-time payments and recurring revenue. The integration uses Littledata's magic sauce to connect Shopify and ReCharge data to Google Analytics. The reporting includes essential information for understanding business performance: End-to-end Google Analytics tracking for the subscriber journey Marketing attribution for subscription revenue, including first-time payments and recurring charges Segmentation by payment source, subscription plan type and product category With this integration plus the power of Littledata's analytics audit tool, you ensure accurate tracking of everything in your ecommerce funnel. You can then take advantage of automated reporting to help you increase revenue, including report packs built specifically for subscription analytics. Littledata's revenue optimisation tools pull directly from your GA data. Advanced users can can also use that data directly in GA - and connect it to dashboard tools like Data Studio and Supermetrics. And the price is right! Littledata provides Google Analytics for ReCharge stores at no extra cost. It's a free integration for any Shopify store using both apps! Setup guide For the Littledata - ReCharge integration to work, you need to install both apps for your Shopify store, then connect them by activating the integration. Install ReCharge Install Littledata’s Shopify app Follow these steps to activate the integration Note that you will activate ReCharge’s basic Google Analytics integration as part of the setup process, but you need to complete the Littledata integration to get full marketing attribution and to track recurring subscriptions (not just first-time payments). For more information about how our ReCharge integration works, check out our knowledge base. If you’re looking for custom setup or help with reporting, consider one of Littledata’s enterprise plans. Higher-tier plans include a dedicated account manager and support from analytics experts. We have many happy ReCharge customers, so please get in touch if you have any special requests!   This post was updated in June 2018

Being able to edit the Google Analytics account is the 2nd highest permission level. You need this if you want to create a new web property in Google Analytics. To grant permissions to another user you will need the highest permission level yourself: being able to manage users on the account. Step 1: Go to account user settings page First click the admin cog in any view under the account in GA you want to change, and then in the left hand list go to User Settings   EITHER Select an existing user from the list and click the 'edit' checkbox OR Add a new user's email (must be a Google account) and check the 'edit' checkbox. Step 3: Check it's working Your colleague should now be able to see 'Create new property' under the list of properties in the middle of the Admin page.

At the Shopify Unite conference today I heard plenty of great ideas such as ShopifyPay but the most interesting for me as a data specialist was the marketing events API. Since we launched our Fix Google Analytics Shopify app earlier this year we’ve known that reporting was a weak spot in Shopify’s platform offering, and they admit that ‘understanding marketing campaign performance’ is one of the biggest challenges of Shopify merchants right now. The ability for other Shopify apps to plug their campaign cost and attribution data into Shopify (via the marketing events API) is a logical step to building Shopify’s own analytics capability, but I don’t believe it will be a substitute for Google Analytics (GA) anytime soon. Here’s why: 1. Google Analytics is the industry standard Every online marketer has used Google Analytics, and many have favourite reports they’ve learned to interpret. Moving them to use a whole new analysis platform will take time– and it’s taken GA 10 years to achieve that dominance. 2. GA provides platform-agnostic data collection For a store using Shopify as their only source of insights, moving away from Shopify would mean losing all the historic marketing performance data – so it would be very hard to make like-for-like comparisons between the old platform and the new. Many of our customers have used GA during and after a platform shift to get continuous historical data. Which ties into my first point that over 85% of businesses have a history of data in GA. 3. Incomplete marketing tagging will still cause issues Making valid analysis on multi-channel marketing performance relies on having ALL the campaigns captured - which is why our GA audit tool checks for completeness of campaign tagging. Shopify’s tracking relies on the same ‘utm_campaign’ parameters as GA, and campaigns that are not properly tagged at the time cannot be altered retrospectively. 4. Google is rapidly developing Google Analytics I’d like to see the Shopify marketing event collection evolve from its launch yesterday, but Google already has a team of hundreds working on Google Analytics, and it seems unlikely that Shopify will be able to dedicate resources to keep up with the functionality that power users need. 5. More integrations are needed for full campaign coverage Shopify’s marketing analysis will only be available for apps that upgrade to using the new API.  Marketing Events has launched with integrations for Mailchimp and Facebook (via Kit) but it won’t cover many of the major channels (other emails, AdWords, DoubleClick for Publishers) that stores use. Those integrations will get built in time, but until then any attribution will be skewed. 6. GA has many third-party integrations Our experience is that any store interested in their campaign attribution quickly wants more custom analysis or cuts of the data. Being able to export the data into Littledata’s custom reports (or Google Sheets or Excel) is a popular feature – and right now Shopify lacks a reporting API to provide the same customisations. You can only pull raw event data back out. That said, there are flaws with how GA attribution works. Importing campaign cost data is difficult and time consuming in GA – apart from the seamless integration with AdWords – and as a result hardly any of the stores we monitor do so. If Shopify can encourage those costs to be imported along with the campaign dates, then the return on investment calculations will be much easier for merchants. I also think Shopify has taken the right pragmatic approach to attribution windows. It counts a campaign as ‘assisting’ the sale if it happens within 30 days of the campaign, and also whether it was ‘last click’ or ‘first click’. I’ve never seen a good reason to get more complicated than that with multi-channel reports in GA, and it’s unlikely that many customers remember a campaign longer than 30 days ago. In conclusion, we love that Shopify is starting to take marketing attribution seriously, and we look forward to helping improve the marketing events feature from its launch yesterday, but we recommend anyone with a serious interest in their marketing performance sticks to Google Analytics in the meantime (and use our Shopify app to do so).

Recurring billing & subscriptions have proved to be, at least in the last few years, the most viable model of business. The return on investment, value per customer and frequency of buying are all higher for any business that adopted a recurring subscription model. This article is focused on Shopify stores that use apps like ReCharge solution and Fix Google Analytics - Littledata app. Nonetheless, everything in here can be applied to all recurring payments business models. Recharge is the most used Shopify recurring billing solution powering thousands of stores and processing tens of thousands of orders daily. Fix Google Analytics - Littledata app completes ReCharge app by providing accurate sales attribution through Google Analytics. If you don't know what the Fix Google Analytics - Littledata app does, here is a short description: We fix your data collection, offer marketing insights and suggest improvements all in one app. Say goodbye to inaccurate data and start getting the full Enhanced Ecommerce experience. Install this app to get: Proper marketing attribution in Google Analytics Product views and shopping behavior Checkout conversion funnels (including voucher usage) Understanding of repeat buyers The first steps to install the Google Analytics tracking for Shopify are illustrated here: How to install the “Fix Google Analytics” Shopify app. Besides this, if you want to go ahead and make an advanced analysis of your customers then you need to make the following setup also: Enable the feature in Google Analytics Firstly, go into Google Analytics (both your normal Google Analytics property and the property that has been created by Littledata) and enable the User-ID feature by going to Admin > Property > Tracking info > User-ID. Click On, next, On, next, give the new view a name and you're done. Attention: The new view will start to collect data from the point of creation so you will need to wait a bit to use this report. The sources of the purchases will be collected from the point of creation so most of the orders will be shown in the first month from direct / (none). Enable the Enhanced Ecommerce feature in Google Analytics Go in Google Analytics, Click Admin. In the right side under view choose the new Registered Users view, that you've created earlier and click Ecommerce Setings. Toggle to ON and then click Next step. Toggle ON for Enhanced Ecommerce, save and you're done. How to see what was the initial source for recurring subscriptions? Using the registered view go under ACQUISITION -> All traffic -> Source/Medium or Channels. This report will show both new customers and recurring ones. We need to apply a segment to this report in order to show only the recurring users. This is how you set up the segment to exclude first time buyers: Now, with the above segment applied, you can check what was the original source or the sale for all transactions from repeating buyers. The other cool and helpful report is the AUDIENCE->Cohort Analysis report. You can see what was the retention of these users in this report for each day, week or month. This report must be read from left to right for the bellow image: Users that bought in December continued to buy in January in a proportion of 38% and in February in a proportion of only 10%. Combining this report with an advanced segment that excludes the first-time buyers AND includes only buyers that had their first transaction in December will provide the number of users that started the subscription package in December and what was the retention of these people. We would love to hear how you use these reports and what you think of the new version of our Fix Google Analytics - Littledata app.

The out-of-the-box analytics solution Shopify provides is a basic one, and unfortunately, the ecommerce data (transactions, add-to-carts, etc.) is incomplete and unreliable. With the help of Littledata, you can now be sure that "Shopify has you covered" with Analytics data collection. If you run a store with a large marketing budget you know how important it is to have accurate Analytics data to establish how your marketing budget is performing. It's also important to read the top 5 pitfalls in tracking ecommerce in Google Analytics as these will also apply to Shopify users. These are the known pitfalls for the out-of-the-box Analytics solution from Shopify: 1.Cross-domain and subdomain tracking issues The Shopify checkout is sending the customers to a Shopify domain (checkout.shopify.com). This makes the visitor sessions end suddenly even if they are in the process of buying something. The sales attribution for Shopify store owners is also painful due to the change of domains causing 'checkout.shopify.com' or a payment gateway to be attributed as the 'last click'. At the moment, Google Analytics can help you track both micro and macro moments in a customer journey. Example of micro-moments are: Clicking on a product link Viewing product details Impressions and clicks of internal promotions Adding / removing a product from a shopping cart Purchases and refunds All of these ecommerce interactions help you as a marketer / acquisition manager / owner to know more about your customer's interactions with your products. You can read more about the benefits of tracking the enhanced e-commerce in the article: use enhanced ecommerce to optimise product listings. 2.Clicking on a product link Clicking on a product link will show you the most appealing products, so you can improve the click-through-rate on the category page. If the click through rate is bad, the action to take is to check your product's master picture and see if there are any errors in getting to the product page. Also, you can investigate if these products are in the right category list. See how can you make these products more appealing to your audience. Read more on our blog on how to improve click-through-rate. 3.Viewing product details Viewing product details will show what are the most viewed product details. You can see this using the URL also, but having this info in a structured way (the product name and product SKU) will make the business analysis far easier. 4.Impressions and clicks on internal promotions Impressions and clicks on internal promotions. Every website uses at least one banner. But how many are tracking the effectiveness of these marketing assets? Knowing how they perform can mean a better visual strategy, a better usage of website space and maybe will save you some money when creating fancy banners with fancy designers! 5.Add-to-carts and removes from cart. Add-to-carts and removes from cart. Every store owner before Christmas asks themselves which products should have discounts or which to should be promoted? Finding out what products are added to cart and removed can answer some of those most vital questions in ecommerce. You can check your product picture and description and see if there are any errors on getting to the checkout. Also, be sure you give your customers access to the information about delivery and refunds. You can compare these products with your competition and see if the price and delivery costs are for the customer's advantage. See how can you make these products more appealing to the customer. 6.Purchases and refunds Purchases. The solution Littledata comes with is a server-side integration to provide a 100% match between your Shopify store and Google Analytics. This ensures that you register the sales data, even if the customer never gets to see the thank you page on your store. Refunds. We all know when seeing online sales, that it doesn't necessarily mean the end of the process. There can be a lower or higher percentage of returns from customers. Shopify is adding back the refunds on the day the packages return to the warehouse and this can be really sad for a normal day when there are negatives sales. There are multiple ways in which you can mess up your Google Analytics data while using Shopify but these were the most important ones to take in while tracking a Shopify store. Want more information on how we will help improve your Shopify analytics? Get in touch with our experts! Interested in joining the list to start a free trial? Sign up!   Get Social! Follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook and keep up-to-date with our Google Analytics insights.