The top six ecommerce analytics tools to measure store performance

Congratulations! If you’re reading this article, you’ve probably successfully built an online store. That’s a great feat in and of itself. Now, you’re ready to move on to the next challenge: growing traffic and online sales. And you can do all of this with the help of the top ecommerce analytics tools.

If you’re like most, you have limited resources as an online store owner and will need to invest carefully in order to scale successfully. It’s nothing to be afraid of, though — it’s all about experimenting and finding what works for you. Not every campaign will be a winner in terms of sales, but if you learn from any missteps, every campaign can contribute to your long-term success. 

But, remember that you can’t improve what you don’t measure, so start by finding a way to collect some key ecommerce metrics that can help you set goals and check your progress over time. Don’t worry too much about how you compare to the competition; instead focus on constant improvement and moving in an upward direction.

The first thing to do is select a few key ecommerce metrics you want to measure for your online store. Remember that you don’t need to measure everything. In fact, that can actually be a distraction to growth. Instead, select a handful of the most important factors you’d like to focus on over the next year and work hard to improve those. Here are some important areas to consider measuring:

• Sales Conversion Rate: Although looking at the number of people who come to your website can be important, growing the number of those who actually make a purchase will be key to your online store’s growth. Divide the number of purchases by the number of sessions and multiply by 100 to find your sales conversion rate. 
• Net Promoter Score: Ever since the Net Promoter Score (a type of customer satisfaction measurement) was started in 2003, it has become a staple in the retail industry to measure success. It asks one question: On a scale of one to ten, how likely are you to recommend us to family or friends? You’ll want to aim for achieving at least a nine or ten on the scale by ensuring a user-friendly site and focusing on customer delight.
• Average Order Value (AOV): The more your customers spend in a single transaction, the better, right? The average order value tracks this across all your customers and can help you measure the success of bundling products and services, upselling initiatives, or suggestive marketing.
• Returning Customer Rate: Most know it’s less expensive to retain shoppers than to find brand new customers. So are your existing customers happy? By measuring your returning customer rate, you can look at the impact of a customer loyalty program as well as how you might be able to anticipate what previous customers may want to purchase next.
• Top Products Sold: A cornerstone of growing your store is making sure you always have your most popular items in stock. Those items are also usually the easiest to sell to new customers and are critical for starting new relationships that could last years and result in many additional purchases.

Once you’ve established some key metrics you want to measure, you’ll want to select the best ecommerce analytics tool to help you track those metrics over time. Here are some things to keep in mind when making that choice:

• Integration with your CMS and ecommerce solution. Be sure your ecommerce analytics tool integrates with your content management system (CMS) and ecommerce solution to ensure smooth and rapid implementation. For online stores built on WordPress and WooCommerce, WooCommerce Analytics is a built-in solution that should be most new store owners’ first area of focus.
• Real-time analytics. The days of weekly or monthly historic reports are long gone. Today’s technology should be able to provide you with real-time analytics so you can base your business decisions on what’s happening in your online store right now.
• A simple user interface. You don’t want to be spending your precious time trying to figure out how to get what you need from your analytics dashboard. Be sure the interface is intuitive and easy to use and comprehend.
• Cost and pricing structure. Be sure you understand how the pricing structure works. Basic ecommerce analytics tools may be free or available on a trial basis. Some advanced features may require a higher subscription fee. Many offer a substantial discount if you pay annually.
• Customer support and community. Even with simple clearcut metrics, you may require assistance at some point during your journey. Be sure your selected partner provides the customer support and community to help you optimize your experience in the long run.
• Reporting capabilities. Besides having real-time access to your data, you may want to be able to look at trends over time. Be sure your selected tool offers the reporting capabilities you want.

1. WooCommerce Analytics

WooCommerce Analytics is a built-in feature of WooCommerce, a leading ecommerce platform for WordPress. Since WooCommerce is the most commonly-used platform in the world for online stores, it’s no surprise that WooCommerce Analytics is packed full of powerful features.

Key features of WooCommerce Analytics:

• Integration with WordPress versions 5.3 and higher
• Key reports (AOV, top selling products, gross revenue, return volumes, coupons used, shipping charges, taxes charged, and more)
• Real-time data analysis
• Filtering and segmentation tools
• Easy CSV downloads
• Detailed and filterable reports based on actual, verified, real-time store sales data
• A customizable dashboard

Pros of WooCommerce Analytics:

• WooCommerce Analytics offers several key reports for store management, including sales reporting and product performance.
• It can provide real-time data analysis, especially when it comes to looking at customer behavior, buying patterns, average order value, and their lifetime value (which is tied directly to customer satisfaction) to your store.
• WooCommerce Analytics lets you manipulate data into CSV files so you can use it in other applications.
• Since the dashboard integrates directly into your WooCommerce dashboard, you can easily access and analyze key ecommerce metrics in one place.
• Its dashboard can be easily customized to meet your specific reporting needs.
• This tool is scalable to grow with your store.

Cons of WooCommerce Analytics:

• WooCommerce Analytics only works with WordPress 5.3+. Older versions are not compatible.
• It’s not compatible with other ecommerce platforms outside of WooCommerce.
• Some training may be required to fully use all features.

Ease of use:

In general WooCommerce Analytics has a clean, user-friendly interface.

Best for:

WooCommerce Analytics works best for stores that use WooCommerce and are seeking to:

• Analyze data such as sales trends, revenue growth, and product performance.
• Identify top-selling products, high-demand categories, and seasonal sales patterns.
• Optimize product offerings, pricing strategies, and inventory management.
• Implement strategies to optimize the user experience and increase conversion rates.
• Measure key metrics such as click-through rates, conversion rates, and return on investment.
• Understand how discounts are being used across the store.
• Keeping track of average refunds in a given time period.
• Filtering and analyzing data based on order status, category, and more.
• Quickly seeing the stock status of all SKUs.
• Analyzing popularity of products by specific variation, which helps store owners see what variations (colors, sizes, etc.) are popular across all products.

Pricing:

This is a free tool built into WooCommerce.

2. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a popular and well-known website analytics tool that helps store owners better understand who’s visiting their online shops, how they got there, what products and services they are most interested in, and other visitor behavior trends. This information can help you improve your user experience and boost engagement with your prospects and customers.

Key features of Google Analytics:

• Real-time tracking of website traffic 
• Valuable insights into the sources of your website visitors
• The ability to see how users interact with your website (bounce rates, user flow visualization, time on site, etc.)
• Website goal and conversions measurements (account registrations, cart page views, etc.)
• Customized reports and dashboards

Pros of Google Analytics:

• Google Analytics can gather a wide range of data, including website traffic, user behavior, demographics, and acquisition sources, to provide a comprehensive view of your online audience and performance.
• Many of its features are free, allowing smaller stores to get started right away.
• Implementation is relatively straightforward, which means a quick setup and deployment.
• Google Analytics allows a great deal of customization of reports, segments, and goals.
• It fairly easily integrates with other Google products such as Google Ads, Google Search Console, and Google Tag Manager.
• It coordinates with Looker Studio to help you create reports and data visualizations that can be used to derive actionable insights from the collected data.

Cons of Google Analytics:

• Since Google Analytics collects and processes a lot of user data, you need to be careful about data privacy and protection regulations.
• If you’re not familiar with web analytics, there can be a steeper learning curve.
• In some cases, Google Analytics may use data sampling to generate reports, which can limit insights.
• Although Google Analytics offers real-time reporting capabilities, the data itself may be delayed by several minutes.
• Since Google Analytics relies on the use of cookies and JavaScript tracking code, it can be susceptible to ad blockers, browser privacy settings, and changes in browser policies.
• If you want to use advanced features like custom dimensions or event tracking, you may need developer assistance or to upgrade to Google Analytics 360.

Ease of use:

Google Analytics has an easy-to-use interface, but it may be challenging to understand for beginners who are new to data analytics terminology.

Best for:

Google Analytics can help online stores that are seeking to:

• Understand how visitors interact with your content like which pages they visit most frequently, and where they drop off.
• Monitor the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns by tracking traffic sources, referral sources, and conversion rates from each.
• Find bottlenecks in the conversion funnel and implement strategies to remove them.
• Segment your audience based on demographics, behavior, or other criteria to get advanced insights.
• Measure ecommerce performance by looking at other metrics like page views, time on page, and bounce rates over time.

Pricing:

The basic tool is free, but a premium version offers additional features for Enterprise organizations. 

3. WooCommerce Google Analytics Pro

This isn’t really an entirely unique platform, but as the name implies, WooCommerce Google Analytics Pro takes the integration between your WooCommerce store and your free Google Analytics account to the next level. 

Essentially, this is an extension that makes it simpler for store owners to complete the complicated integration required between WooCommerce and Google Analytics in order to measure ecommerce success and performance. 

This powerful combination helps you get even more detailed insights into your shop’s traffic and ecommerce events so that you can improve your sales funnel and drive more revenue.

Key features of WooCommerce Google Analytics Pro:

• Advanced ecommerce tracking capabilities such as product impressions, clicks, add to cart events, and purchases
• A user-friendly, integrated dashboard
• The ability to customize tracking settings so you can watch specific events or input custom dimensions and metrics
• Event tracking for various user interactions on your website, such as clicks on outbound links, file downloads, and form submissions
• Comprehensive and actionable insights on things like product performance, sales attribution, shopping behavior, and customer lifetime value
• Seamless integration with other WooCommerce extensions and add-ons

Pros of WooCommerce Google Analytics Pro:

• WooCommerce Google Analytics Pro offers advanced ecommerce tracking capabilities, helping you better understand product performance, sales attribution, and customer behavior.
• It allows you to customize tracking settings, set up custom dimensions and metrics, and configure event tracking so you can measure performance towards very specific ecommerce business goals.
• You can track many more user interactions and events on your website, such as clicks on outbound links, coupon addition/removal, cart quantity change, and insights into payment methods.
• It supports cross-domain tracking, which helps you to follow user sessions across multiple domains or subdomains.

Cons of WooCommerce Google Analytics Pro:

• WooCommerce Google Analytics Pro is a paid extension to help with access to otherwise free (albeit advanced) aspects of Google Analytics.
• Advanced features can lead to a steeper learning curve, especially for those who haven’t worked with Google Analytics or ecommerce analytics before.
• The more data you collect, the more likely you are to face privacy concerns and compliance issues.

Ease of use:

WooCommerce Google Analytics Pro offers a friendly interface that’s integrated with WooCommerce. It may require additional training to fully utilize all its features.

Best for:

WooCommerce Google Analytics Pro is best for online shops that want to:

• Track advanced ecommerce data such as product impressions, clicks, adding products to cart, initiating checkout, and completed purchases.
• Follow the performance of individual products more accurately like which ones are generating the most revenue and which ones are popular but not converting.
• Set up custom dimensions and metrics.
• See user interactions across multiple domains.
• Monitor specific user interactions on your website, such as clicks on external links, video views, or form submissions.
• Track events like “add to cart” and “checkout started”. 

Pricing:

WooCommerce Google Analytics Pro costs $79 per year. 

4. Metorik

Metorik is an analytics and management tool designed for WooCommerce. It offers comprehensive insights into sales, customer behavior, and inventory, which can help online stores make smarter ecommerce business decisions. Metorik’s intuitive interface simplifies data interpretation and can help you optimize and grow your online store more efficiently and effectively.

Key Features of Metorik:

• Detailed information about sales, customers, and products
• Automated customer segments based on detailed criteria 
• The ability to send personalized emails based on customer behavior
• Tracking of inventory levels and low stock alerts
• Comprehensive customer profiles with order history and engagement data
• Customizable dashboards to help monitor specific metrics

Pros of Metorik:

• Metorik can provide a look into things like sales data, customer engagement and profiles, and product inventory levels.
• Its user-friendly interface is intuitive, which facilitates easy navigation and data interpretation.
• It streamlines tasks like email marketing and inventory management, allowing you to save time and focus on strategy and other priorities.
• Metorik allows you to tailor reports and dashboards to suit your specific ecommerce business needs.
• It helps enable targeted marketing strategies, which can lead to improved conversion rates.

Cons of Metorik:

• Although Metorik does offer a free trial, it requires an ongoing monthly subscription after the first 30 days. This may be prohibitive for smaller or newer online stores.
• While the interface is user-friendly, utilizing all the advanced features may require some training and time.
• The tool only integrates with a couple of ecommerce platforms — thankfully WooCommerce is one of them.

Ease of use:

The Metorik interface itself is generally easy-to-use, however, learning the intricacies of the platform and extracting its full value may take a while.

Best for:

Metorik is best for online shops that are looking to:

• Track sales trends, customer behavior, and inventory levels to optimize ecommerce business strategies and overall performance.
• Understand purchasing patterns and segment customers for personalized marketing campaigns.
• Efficiently manage stock levels and streamline reordering processes to make sure products are always available for existing and new customers.
• Utilize automated email campaigns based on customer actions to enhance engagement and retention.

Pricing:

After a free 30-day trial, Metorik’s smallest package costs $20 per month for 100 orders plus $10 per month to add automatic emails and abandoned cart emails. Tiered packages are available up to 25,000 orders per month, which costs $500 per month plus an additional $300 for email add-ons. Discounts are offered for annual billing.

5. Product Sales Report Pro

This extension for WooCommerce is designed to create impactful sales reports that include ecommerce metrics to help you make the best decisions for your online store. You can set up an unlimited number of reports and save them as templates to make report generation easier than ever. 

You can report on data such as product sales performance, effectiveness of sales strategies, and inventory and accounting details.

Key features of Product Sales Report Pro:

• The ability to generate and share custom reports with a single click
• Data sorting based on predefined ranges for customization
• Sorting of customers based on order status including pending payment, on hold, or cancellation
• Product analytics by category, tags, or variations
• The ability to sort data by field and display preferences

Pros of Product Sales Report Pro:

• Product Sales Report Pro allows you to quickly generate a customized report and share it with team members.
• It lets you save report presets, making future report generation even easier.
• The tool offers granular sorting options, allowing you to manipulate data to detailed levels.
• Reports can also be downloaded in various formats so that they are easy to share and include in other channels.
• Product Sales Report Pro uses conditional logic and dynamic reporting ranges to give you even more flexibility.
• Reports can be automated to save you time and effort.

Cons of Product Sales Report Pro:

• Although Product Sales Report Pro does offer a 14-day money-back guarantee, it requires an ongoing monthly subscription.
• Since reports offer so much flexibility, it may take time to learn how to best use them for your particular application.
• This extension is designed only for WooCommerce and WordPress.
• This tool is limited to report generation, offering a narrower scope than other ecommerce analytics tools.

Ease of use:

Product Sales Report Pro has an easy-to-use interface but offers so many customization and data manipulation options that it can take time to learn how to optimize the reports.

Best for:

Product Sales Report Pro works best for ecommerce stores that want to:

• Create extremely customized reports quickly and easily.
• Set up reusable templates for generating ongoing reports.
• Be able to manipulate data for certain dates or time periods.
• Analyze and segment customers by where they are in the purchasing process.
• Review products by how they are tagged, a specific grouping, or detailed product variations.
• Have a great deal of flexibility in sorting, displaying, and sharing information.

Pricing:

For a single site, this extension is available for $59 annually. Three sites cost $79, and an unlimited number of sites costs $99. 

6. MonsterInsights

MonsterInsights is a tool with the capability to integrate Google Analytics with your WordPress site. It provides an easy-to-use interface inside your WordPress dashboard that allows you to see important data easily.

Key features of MonsterInsights:

• Easy set-up that doesn’t require lines of code
• Website traffic sources, user demographics, and top-performing pages data right on your WordPress dashboard
• Ecommerce metrics such as sales, revenue, conversion rates, and product performance
• Custom tracking events and goals so you can see specific user interactions on your site including button clicks, form submissions, and file downloads
• Easy integration with other tools
• Anonymous IP addresses and cookie consent banners to support data privacy
• SEO ranking reports
• The ability to track the engagement of videos from a variety of sources, including YouTube and Vimeo

Pros of MonsterInsights:

• MonsterInsights is straightforward to use and helps simplify integrating your WordPress site with Google Analytics.
• The tool allows you to see your data within your WordPress dashboard.
• It also offers ecommerce analytics such as sales, revenue, and conversion rates within WooCommerce.
• Setting up custom tracking and reports provides you with flexibility to see what specific visitors are doing, allowing you to refine your marketing strategies.
• It’s easy to integrate with other plugins.
• MonsterInsights has built-in features to help you comply with data privacy rules.

Cons of MonsterInsights:

• Although MonsterInsights has a free version with basic features, more advanced functionality such as ecommerce tracking and custom dimensions require a premium subscription that can be costly.
• MonsterInsights relies on Google Analytics to gather and analyze website data, which means it can be dependent on Google’s platform and its limitations.
• MonsterInsights may take some time to understand, especially if you’re not as familiar with analytics tools.

Ease of use:

MonsterInsights has a clean interface and is accessible through the WordPress dashboard.

Best for:

The best use case for MonsterInsights is for ecommerce stores that want to: 

• Have a different visual approach to more advanced ecommerce metrics (like quick identification of top-converting referral sources, etc.) 
• See more granular information about user behavior, like engagement with videos 

Pricing:

The Plus version costs $99.60 per year; the Pro version costs $199.60 per year; and the Agency version costs $399.60 per year.

Jetpack Stats is a tool that works perfectly alongside WooCommerce Analytics. Its focus is mostly on the traffic details of your site, as opposed to ecommerce metrics. But like WooCommerce Analytics, you can view key information directly in the WordPress dashboard — a super helpful aspect for people who prefer a centralized location for all of their site management activities.

With Jetpack Stats, you can see essential data about visitor volumes, top referral sources, top geographic locations for visitors, most popular posts, most successful pages, best-performing authors, and more. Not only that, but you can also measure link clicks, video plays, file downloads, among other things.

It also has strong integrations with Jetpack Social and Blaze for social media engagement and growth and content promotion.

By using these two tools together, you can truly gain a holistic view of your entire site, from the second a visitor arrives to the moment they make a purchase.

As you’re incorporating ecommerce analytics tools into your online shop, you’ll probably have questions about the process. Here are some of the top questions and answers to help:

What are KPIs (key performance indicators) in ecommerce?

KPIs stand for “key performance indicators”. Specifically in the ecommerce world, these are measurable data points that can show how well your ecommerce store is performing. 

Ideally, a key performance indicator will help you see where you’re starting, reveal areas that need attention, and measure your progress over time. Without KPIs, it’s easy to lose your way and waste valuable time and resources on activities that are less important, hindering your ability to grow and scale.

What are the most important metrics for ecommerce? 

The most important KPIs for ecommerce vary from business to business. Some may prioritize average order value, while others want to focus on customer lifetime value or customer acquisition costs. 

Begin thinking about your specific online shop and what ecommerce metrics would be most helpful in facilitating the best business decisions. Here are a few possibilities:

• Conversion rate: The percentage of visitors who actually make a purchase
• Average order value: The average amount customers spend per order.
• Customer acquisition cost: How much it actually costs to get a new customer
• Customer lifetime value: How much you can expect a single customer to spend (and be worth) across their lifetime
• Cart abandonment rate: The percentage of visitors who add an item to their cart and leave without completing their purchase.

Does Google Analytics work for WooCommerce?

Yes, Google Analytics integrates seamlessly with WooCommerce. The quickest way to do so is with an extension such as Google Analytics for WooCommerce.

Does WooCommerce have built-in analytics tools?

Yes, WooCommerce Analytics is a built-in feature of WooCommerce, offering reports and ecommerce analytics to help you make smarter business decisions.

One of the most exciting things about WooCommerce is the ability to integrate with nearly any digital tool on the planet. If an extension doesn’t exist, the open source licensing means anyone can hire a developer to create a custom solution. 

The good news is that between the built-in functionality of WooCommerce Analytics and a plethora of extensions like Jetpack Stats, everyone from beginners to experienced ecommerce data scientists can find and connect the right tools to see what’s working, what needs improvement, and just how far they’ve come. 

Explore all of the marketing extensions available for WooCommerce. 

About

Brent MacKinnon

Brent MacKinnon is the director of product marketing and developer advocacy at WooCommerce, helping to make the platform better for developers and merchants alike. With over a decade of experience in product marketing and strategy, Brent is passionate about supporting the WooCommerce community and helping entrepreneurs of all kinds succeed with Woo.