Category : Shopify
How to add Littledata's code snippet to your Shopify store templates
For most Shopify stores, the Littledata - Google Analytics reporting app automatically adds our tracking script to your shop's template. However, if your store has a custom template/layout, there will be some cases where our app isn't able to do this automatically. Luckily it's super-easy to resolve this issue by adding a code snippet yourself. Once you add the code, your store will automatically call our tracking script at just the right time. That way we can help you get accurate data across the customer life cycle. In this quick how-to guide I'll show you how to add the code snippet. How to add the snippet to your shop's code 1. Edit the code in your Shopify admin Go to your Shopify Admin > Online Store > Themes > Actions > Edit code. 2. Copy the snippet Copy the following snippet. (Even though our script has already been added to your store, it still needs to be called for each Layout.) [code language="javascript"] <!-- Start of Littledata - Fix Google Analytics Script--> {% include 'LittledataLayer' %} <!-- End of Littledata - Fix Google Analytics Script --> [/code] 3. Paste the snippet Now paste the snippet in every one of your store's layouts, just under the <body> tag. In the example below, we'll paste the snippet in row 77. 4. Save and repeat After you paste the code, click Save and repeat the steps above for each layout. Note that you will need to make this change for each layout when you are installing our app, but also when you create another layout for a new campaign. Anytime you create a new layout, just follow the steps above to add the right code snippet. That's it! You're now all set to get a consistent stream of accurate data and intelligent insights for your Shopify store. Remember that it takes about a week for the new analytics setup to start producing useful reports. If you've followed these steps but still have questions, please don't hesitate to get in touch with our team. We <3 code. And we're here to deal with it so you don't have to :)
Treasure hunting tools for Shopify stores (VIDEO)
These days, you can sell just about anything online. From subscription boxes to charities, everyone is using websites and mobile apps to enhance the customer journey. But even if you advertise on the right channels, how do you know if your marketing is working? And how do you connect that traffic to revenue? Watch this quick video to see how the right analytics setup will help you avoid getting shipwrecked on the seas of ecommerce, whatever you might be 'selling' online. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hE4nzZycVLE Google Analytics can take you much deeper than Shopify’s native reporting, but setting it up correctly is difficult without the right tools. Littledata gives growing Shopify stores a clear map of shopper behaviour, from marketing campaigns -- how people find you -- to the intricacies of buying behaviour: what customers buy, how they buy it, and who will want to buy more. Our Shopify reporting app automatically audits your Google Analytics setup to make sure you’re tracking everything you should be, and tracking it correctly. [subscribe] We give you accurate data and smart reports on everything from marketing channels like Google AdWords, Facebook and Twitter, to product performance and shopping cart activity, including details like checkout steps and voucher codes. The app makes it easy to tie every aspect of your store back to revenue, so you can make decisions like a captain instead of drifting along in the back of the boat and drawing the map as you float along. And we integrate seamlessly with other popular Shopify apps, including ReCharge and Refersion, so your analytics will always match every touch point in the customer journey. Sign up for free today and we’ll start building a personal treasure map for your Shopify store. Pricing is based on transaction volumes (but you're free to upgrade to a higher plan at any time), and all plans include a free 14-day trial!
Shopify vs Magento: How to choose an ecommerce platform
How do you choose between Shopify and Magento? Hostinger's Laura Ramonaitytė breaks down the differences between these popular ecommerce platforms. Taking your offline business online, or starting a new online business from scratch, can be overwhelming. However, if you take time to do research and choose the right ecommerce platform for your particular business, you'll alleviate stress and have a much greater chance of success. With so many options in the market, it can be difficult to know that you're making the right decision. Nevertheless, your first preference should be choosing a platform that can fulfil not just current but also future requirements of your online store, at least as much as you can estimate those future needs. To help you make this difficult decision, we've compared the two most popular ecommerce platforms: Shopify and Magento. We look at a number of different categories and performance areas, so make sure to read through the entire post to help you make the best decision for your business. Core differences Before starting the detailed comparison, let’s take a look at some core differences between Shopify and Magento. Shopify is a complete ecommerce platform, while Magento is free and open-source software. For Shopify, secure web hosting is included in all main subscription plans, whereas for Magento you need to set up your own hosting. Both platforms have technology ecosystems with apps and themes to help you customise your site and track online sales and marketing, but Shopify's app store is much more robust and developed, with over 2,000 apps available since they opened to third-party developers in 2009! Let's dive deeper into differences between the platforms. [subscribe] Pricing These platforms handle setup and operating costs differently. Shopify provides a 14-day free trial. After that, users need to purchase a monthly subscription (you can start the trial and then decide on a plan, which is a nice touch). Users can choose from 3 main subscription plans, currently ranging from $29-299 per month, plus lite (for basic selling via Facebook and 'buy' buttons) and enterprise (Shopify Plus) options. Shopify is a fully hosted platform, which means you pay a flat fee per month for a plan that includes hosting. It's worth mentioning that credit card charges and transaction fees can be extra. On the other hand, Magento offers two pricing options: Magento CE and Magento EE. Magento CE (Community Edition) is free for download and use, and you are not required to buy any monthly subscription. It can be a perfect option for small and mid-sized businesses. Magento EE (Enterprise Edition) is another option, ideal for larger online stores and established businesses. The price depends on the size of your business. You can find the exact pricing by contacting Magento specialists and requesting a quote. Startups.co.uk estimates that the costs for setting up and maintaining a Magento EE site are a good fit only for larger ecommerce sites and enterprises: To give some indication, a very basic Magento shop selling less than 6,000 products, that uses pre-made Magento themes, will cost you in the region of £20,000 to £40,000. On the other hand, if you have cheap web hosting, a Magento CE site using a free theme could be quite affordable, as long as you have the expertise to maintain it. Conclusion: Shopify has fixed pricing while the cost of Magento depends on different factors such as the costs of hosting plans, technical support and plugins. If you're an experience ecommerce developer, Magento probably gives the best cost-benefit. Otherwise, Shopify is a better deal. [subscribe] Templates and Designs Elegant templates and designs are a crucial part of any online store. The template which looks and feels good can attract more people and eventually earn more revenue. Screenshots from the Seaside style of the Providence theme for Shopify Shopify has it own theme store, where users can look for beautifully designed, highly-responsive templates and themes. However, since Shopify is a hosted shopping cart, users get limited options for customizations. That said, Shopify's themes are awesome for plug-and-play. The themes are organized by industry, such as Furniture or Clothing, and also by type of store, such as themes optimised for stores with very small (or very large) inventories. Shopify themes generally cost over $100 but include useful features like Instagram product feeds. Screenshots from the free Absolute Theme for Magento Since Magento is open source and has been supported by a large developer community from the start, it has a range of template options. There are free and paid themes available in the Magento Marketplace, and most are mobile responsive, but there is also a huge variety of free and paid themes available from independent front end developers around the world. It's worth noting that some Magento stores with solid coding experience do create custom themes on their own as well. Here's a guide to theme development if you're running Magento 2. Conclusion If you're looking for more theme options and customization, Magento is the winner. On the other hand, why start from scratch? Whatever you're looking for, it probably already exists in a Shopify theme! SEO Optimization If you are starting your online store from the ground up, it is necessary for you to pick the ecommerce platform that has SEO capabilities as well. Nowadays, more than half of all online purchases begin with an online search in search engines like Google and Bing. Therefore, it is crucial that ecommerce platform you have chosen supports various search optimization techniques. In our analysis, the overall SEO score for Magento is 95 out of 100 whereas Shopify's SEO score is 98 out of 100. Shopify is a highly SEO-optimized platform that has all the basic and advanced SEO features in all its plans. You can easily edit your title tags, meta description, page URLs, according to your requirement. Besides this, you can also customize your image file name and also edit alt tags as per SEO requirements. Like Shopify, Magento is also a fully SEO-optimized ecommerce platform that supports extensive SEO functionality. Along with basic SEO settings, it also provides some advanced SEO options, including canonical tags for separate categories and products, robot.txt files, image optimization, meta tags for products and home page. Conclusion Both platforms seem equally competent in terms of SEO optimization. As long as you have an organized content strategy, you can take advantage of the SEO capabilities of either platform to get more traffic. Customer Support Reliable support is more important than anything else. As a newbie, you may need to access customer support many times in a day. Consequently, invest in the company that has better technical support and back up based on what your needs might be. Shopify provides 24/7 technical support, which means that you can access support day and night whenever needed. There are three ways you can access their customer support team: Email Support Phone Support Live Chat Magento’s customer support does not include any official service. However, you can look for answers to your queries in its extensive developer community, Magento Forums, and in their documentation. Almost all platform-related queries are already answered there. Conclusion: This is the category where Shopify is definitely the winner. Final Thoughts In conclusion, both Shopify and Magento have various stunning features and they can manage your online store efficiently and help to boost your revenue. Magento is an open source platform and is more flexible, but you need to have the staff and knowledge to develop it. Features, customer support and ease of use probably make Shopify a better ecommerce platform for a standard ecommerce business. I hope this post inspires you to dig deeper and make an informed choice before launching your online store, whichever platform you choose. There are other platforms available as well, such as WooCommerce (Shopify vs WooCommerce), so don't just pick one randomly! Hostinger is a leading worldwide cheap web hosting provider.
Our top 5 posts from 2017
We're an ecommerce analytics company, so it's no surprise that Shopify and Google Analytics top the list of topics in our most-read and most-shared posts of 2017. But what continues to surprise us is how many online businesses know that their analytics setup needs to be fixed, but put off the decision to take action. Luckily tools like our Shopify reporting app are making it easier than ever to get accurate data and automated reporting that really drives revenue. If fixing your tracking and making decisions based on trustworthy data wasn't your main new year's resolution for 2018, it should be! Here are the top 5 posts from our analytics blog in 2017. They should provide some inspiration. [subscribe] 1. Is Google Analytics compliant with GDPR? From May 2018 the new General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) will come into force in the European Union, causing all marketers and data engineers to re-consider how they store, transmit and manage data – including Google Analytics. This popular post looks at basic and full compliance. The rights enshrined by GDPR relate to any data your company holds which is personally identifiable: that is, can be tied back to a customer who contacts you. 2. Shopify Marketing Events vs Google Analytics The ability for other Shopify apps to plug their campaign cost and attribution data into Shopify (via the new marketing events API) is a logical step to building Shopify’s own analytics capability, but is it really a viable substitute for Google Analytics? 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. 3.Is Google Analytics accurate? 6 common issues and how to resolve them How do you know if your Google Analytics setup is giving you reliable data? In this much-linked blog post we look at common problems and explain what can be done to make your tracking more accurate. If the journey of visitors on your site proceeds via another payment processor or gateway, you could be losing the link between the sale (or goal conversion) and the original marketing campaigns. 4. How to increase revenue with Refersion and affiliate marketing Affiliate marketing consistently outperforms other channels for ecommerce businesses. In this special guest post, our integration partner Refersion shares essential tips about how Littledata customers can get a piece of the action. When customers come through affiliate channels, their average customer revenue is 58% higher than other channels. 5. What you can track with our Shopify app 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. This much-shared post outlines 'Shopify’s Standard Tracking vs Littledata for Shopify'. It's a match we're betting on! Shopify is one of the best ecommerce platforms on the planet, but their standard analytics are extremely limited.
6 essential benchmarks for Shopify stores
Understanding how your website performs versus similar sites is the best way to prioritise what to improve. In this post we take a look at 6 top benchmarks for optimising Shopify store performance. Accurate benchmark data is especially useful to the increasing number of ecommerce companies using web performance benchmarks, such as bounce rates and home page reliance, as core elements of their sales and marketing KPIs. Understanding benchmarks is a key to success. To put together this new benchmarking report, we analysed current data from 470 Shopify retailers. If you're wondering how you compare, check out our Shopify analytics app. Average order value Average order value (AOV) or Average revenue per paying user (ARPU) is the total monthly revenue divided by the number of users which transacted that month. It is a measure of how well you are up-selling and cross-selling your products, depending on your product mix. What is a good average order value for Shopify stores? The benchmark is $69. The average is slightly lower ($63.50) if you are a smaller Shopify store. More than $120 AOV would put you in the top quartile, and one of our top-performing stores in the luxury ecommerce sector is averaging $2,080 per order! If your Shopify store has a lower AOV than the benchmark, you might try increasing your average checkout value by cross-selling other products, offering free shipping above a minimum threshold or increasing pricing on selected products. Ecommerce conversion rate Ecommerce conversion is the number of purchases divided by the total number of sessions. Most visitors will take more than one session to decide to purchase, but this is the standard measure of conversion rate. It is a measure of how good a fit your traffic is for your products, and how well your site converts this traffic into customers. What is a good ecommerce conversion rate for Shopify stores? The benchmark is 1.75%. Larger stores have pushed this to 1.85%, and if you are more than 2.8% you are in the top quartile. The highest conversion rate we’ve seen on Shopify is 8%. Can you increase the conversion rate with more attractive product displays, or improving the checkout process? Enhanced ecommerce tracking will help you identify exactly where the blockers lie. Bounce rate from mobile search Since more than 60% of Google searches are now done on mobile, ensuring your site design works on a small screen is important for branding and sales. Bounce rate is the percent of visits of only one page – and will be high if your landing pages do not engage. Google will even adjust your mobile ranking for a given keyword depending on what proportion of visitors stick on your page - a good indication that your link was useful. What is a good bounce rate from mobile search for Shopify stores? The benchmark is 47.5%. The biggest Shopify stores have got this below 40%, and overall large retailers have 38% mobile bounce rate. So it’s not a problem with the Shopify platform, so much as a problem with the store theme – or how the options and products are displayed on a smaller screen. Can you improve the first impressions of the landing pages, put key content higher up the page, or decrease the page load speed to reduce that bounce rate? [subscribe] Delay before page content appears The delay between a page request by the user and them being to read or click on that page. This is more important than full page load speed for AJAX / lazy loading sites (also called the ‘DOM Interactive Time’). What is a good delay time before page content appears? The benchmark for Shopify stores is 2.75 seconds. Even larger retailers have this down to 2.8 seconds, so Shopify sites do well on this score. Anything less than 3 seconds is generally acceptable. Internet users are increasingly intolerant of slow sites. Your developers could look at Google PageSpeed Insights for more details. Often the delay will be down to extra scripts which could be delayed or removed. Server response time This is the part of the page load speed which is entirely outside of your control – and due to the speed of the servers your site runs on. What is a good server response time for Shopify stores? The benchmark is 322ms. The average for larger ecommerce is 542ms – so Shopify’s server infrastructure is serving you well here. Reliance on the homepage This is the percent of visitors who land on your homepage. If this is below 40% you rely heavily on your homepage to capture brand or paid search traffic. Google increasingly rewards sites with a greater volume of landing pages targeting more specific keyword phrases. What is a good reliance on homepage percentage for Shopify stores? The benchmark is 32%. Larger Shopify stores, with many more landing pages, have reduced this to 7.3% of traffic landing on the homepage on average. Can you build out product landing pages and inbound links to copy their advantage? Ready to benchmark your own website, stop playing guessing games and start scaling your ecommerce business? Our Shopify reporting app is the easiest way to get accurate benchmarking. Install Littledata today and you'll get instant access to up to 20 relevant industry benchmarks for ecommerce sites, plus the tools you need to fix your analytics for accurate tracking, so you'll always know for sure where your website stands. It's all about smart data that helps you focus on making changes that drive revenue and increase conversions. We're here to help you grow!
ReCharge report pack for subscription-based businesses
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!
The end of the ecommerce 'thank you' page
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. [subscribe] 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.
What you can track with Littledata's Google Analytics reporting app for Shopify
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? Here's a table detailing what you can track with the Littledata Shopify app: Shopify's Standard Tracking vs the Littledata Shopify App Standard Tracking in Shopify The Littledata Shopify App Essentials What pages users see ✓ ✓ Order volumes in Shopify match GA ✓ Sales attribution to the source of the visit * ✓ Demographics tracking (age group, interests, etc.) ✓ Uses the latest, fastest gtag tracker ✓ Ecommerce behaviour Analyse order coupons / discount codes ✓ ✓ Product page views ✓ ✓ Products are added to cart ✓ ✓ Products are removed from cart ✓ Clicks on products in a list, and CTR ✓ Product position in a list ✓ Product lists views by category ✓ Analyse by product colour, size, etc ✓ Track checkout steps (billing, shipping, payment) ✓ Segment by customer lifetime value ✓ Recurring payments Track ReCharge recurring payments ✓ Differentiate ReCharge sales from normal sales ✓ Build cohorts by first payment date ✓ Extra accuracy Data layer can be used with GTM ✓ Deduct returns from total transactions ✓ Look at behaviour for a single Shopify customer ✓ Get attribution right from payment gateways like paypal.com ✓ Exclude spam traffic from GA ✓ Capture on-site search terms ✓ Store currency matches GA currency ✓ Store timezone matches GA timezone ✓ * Orders can be attributed back to a marketing channel or campaign, and linked to multiple previous visits by the customer using multi-channel attribution in Google Analytics [subscribe heading="Top Shopify app for Google Analytics" button_text="Learn more" button_link="https://www.littledata.io/shopify"] 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. In addition to 100% accurate sales tracking, Enhanced Ecommerce events and advanced marketing attribution, our Shopify app includes ReCharge integration for subscription analytics. After all, how can you grow a business unless you understand what share of your sales comes from repeat buying versus new customers? 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!
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