How to Use WooCommerce Analytics To Optimize Your Store

Once you’ve set up WooCommerce, configured your payment options, and come to grips with social media integration, SEO, and more, it’s time to monitor your store and tweak it based on its performance.

This is a constant work in progress and will constitute the bulk of your efforts in maintaining your store going forward. While you can set up a regular analytics tool for a WooCommerce store just like any other, I suggest you take a different route. Instead of installing Google Analytics as so many people recommend, you should use the native WooCommerce reporting screen. Here’s why.

Avoid Deep Google Analytics Integration for WooCommerce

Most website tutorials on WooCommerce Analytics focus on Google’s products. This is because, for years, Google Analytics was a free, easy-to-use software with easy integration and built-in reports. However, Google decided to mess things up and replace a perfectly good product with one that is barely usable. As a result, Google Analytics 4 is a complete mess, and despite having over two years to improve, Google hasn’t fixed even the most basic of things like real-time reporting.

GA4 is impossible to use, and completely unintuitive. And given Google’s reluctance to improve their interface, and shocking willingness to kill their products, no matter how useful, I can’t recommend Google Analytics for WooCommerce anymore.

Luckily for us, WooCommerce has a perfectly serviceable analytics tool integrated right into your dashboard.

Using WooCommerce Analytics

The best part about using WooCommerce analytics is that you don’t have to set up anything. The report is already available and ready to use. On the right-hand side of your WordPress dashboard, find the “Analytics” tab as shown here:

From here, you can access all the important reports specifically for WooCommerce. The layout is self-explanatory, so there’s not much I need to explain.

Advantages of WooCommerce Analytics vs External Tools

Here’s why you should stick to the default WooCommerce analytics reports instead of using external tools.

#1. No Set Up

This is the first of the two most important reasons to use WooCommerce’s inbuilt analytics tools instead of a 3rd party software. External party tools like Google Analytics require a lot of setup and maintenance to fully integrate with WooCommerce. For reference, here is Google’s documentation for setting up WooCommerce tags with Google Analytics. The whole process is a nightmare from start to finish. And when something inevitably goes wrong, I can guarantee that you won’t remember how you installed it in the first place.

#2. No Special Integration for Registering Sales

It’s not enough to set up a 3rd party tool to track visitors. You also need to jump through hoops to register the specific actions for registering sales, and more. For example, Google Analytics has a special “Ecommerce” section under the “Conversion” tab, which shows you that you need to set up Ecommerce tracking as shown here:

By contrast, the default WooCommerce analytics dashboard already knows what constitutes a sale, and you don’t have to add any additional code, or agree to special conditions, allowing Google to track god-knows-what information about you and your customers.

#3. WooCommerce Analytics is More Accurate

This is the most important consideration – WooCommerce analytics gets its sales data directly from your database. It’s not uncommon for people to go through all the effort to set up Google Analytics, only to find that it reports wrong information because of some quirks of data collection. Your WooCommerce Analytics revenue information, on the other hand, measures sales data directly and is therefore always accurate.

Bottom line: It’s OK to use 3rd party analytics tools for general information about visitors on your website, but it’s borderline malpractice to use it for actual sales tracking.

Important Metrics for WooCommerce Analytics

When evaluating the performance of your WooCommerce site, it’s useful to focus on a few key metrics. Here’s a screenshot of all the different subsections of the analytics report in WooCommerce:

As you can see, you get a good collection of the various metrics on WooCommerce analytics. Here are the most important ones.

#1. Revenue

This is the most obvious metric that you should look at when judging the performance of your site. The Revenue tab measures the following:

1. Gross sales
2. Returns
3. Coupon value
4. Taxes
5. Shipping costs

Based on these, you can see a snapshot of the numbers most important to you. The screen displays a graph showing the sales, along with another line indicating the sales from last year. My WooCommerce installation is a demo site, so I don’t have data to populate the database and show a screenshot, unfortunately.

The revenue screen also shows you a day-by-day breakdown of the sales data as shown here:

For each of the above metrics, you can click the sub-heading, and the graph will change to show you the time-series data for that metric. For example, you can see how your shipping costs have changed over time.

Note on Data Inclusion

WooCommerce recently changed its accounting mechanism to reflect only completed sales where the customer’s payment has gone through instead of when it was created. In most cases, this turns out to be the same thing, but not always. You can change this behavior in the “Settings” tab of WooCommerce Analytics.

#2. Conversion Rate

This important metric shows you what percentage of visitors who came to your site actually completed a sale. Unfortunately, WooCommerce doesn’t show this to you directly, but the calculation is a simple one – look at the total number of unique visitors and use it to divide the number of unique sales.

If you want a more direct measure of conversion ratios, you’ll need to rely on a 3rd party analytics tool like – yes – Google Analytics. You can set up an event that fires when you receive confirmation of payment and then create a custom report that shows you the conversions. Or you can play around with the Ecommerce functionality of GA. Just remember what I mentioned above – that the data shown in GA will be less accurate compared to what you see in WooCommerce Analytics.

#3. Cart Abandonment Rate

The cart abandonment rate refers to the percentage of customers who added stuff to their cart but didn’t confirm the purchase. This is a ripe area for optimizing your site performance because you know that these customers are interested in your product, so they need less convincing compared to other visitors. You’ve already done the hard work, and now all you need to provide is the final push to get them to make the purchase.

You can use the cart abandonment rate metric to identify clogs in your order processing systems and try and streamline it further so that a greater percentage of your customers complete the purchase.

WooCommerce Analytics Doesn’t Have to be Hard

Thanks to the excellent data that WooCommerce makes available to you for free and without any additional setup, you can start viewing your store analytics immediately after you make a sale. You don’t have to worry about data delays or setting up a 3rd party tool like Google Analytics – which in any case is both inaccurate and hard to use. You can even connect plugins that directly access the WooCommerce database for analytics integration – MonsterInsights is one well-known example.

So open that Analytics tab and start measuring!