What is a Shopify dashboard?
A Shopify dashboard is an interface tool that consolidates data from multiple sources (e.g., Shopify Analytics, Google Analytics, Facebook Ads) to track and display key performance indicators (KPIs) (e.g., sales, conversion rates, average order value), enabling store owners and managers to monitor store performance and create presentations for stakeholders.
Shopify dashboards are typically built using flexible tools like Google Looker Studio, Power BI, Google Sheets, or platform-specific solutions to enable high customization and integration of multiple data sources.
What to include in a Shopify dashboard?
An actionable Shopify dashboard balances context and specificity based on the audience (executives, managers, and analysts) and their use cases.
Executive Shopify dashboards
Executive dashboards for CEOs, CFOs, and stakeholders show the store's bottom-line impact. Reviewed weekly, monthly, or quarterly, they include:
- Sales performance analysis: by product category, using attribution for large budgets.
- Unit economics analysis: CAC, LTV, payback, ARPU from store-acquired customers
- Cohort analysis: retention, expansion, and LTV by customer cohort (sign-up period, acquisition channel)
- Add text for additional context to translate metrics for non-technical audiences. Present in slide decks and simplified Looker Studio reports.
Shopify manager dashboards
Manager dashboards have cross-channel views with drill-downs to see performance by product, region, team member, and sales channel. They help align teams, define tactics, and include:
- Cross-channel reporting: overall sales, product, or region reporting across channels
- Goal tracking: compare current performance vs objectives
- Audits for prioritization and spotting issues
- Competitive analysis for product and pricing mapping
- Product, customer, and market research
Operational Shopify Dashboards
Operational dashboards for analysts and store managers have granular, customizable KPIs to solve technical issues. Monitored hourly, daily, or weekly, they cover:
- Inventory: stock levels, turnover rates, reorder alerts
- Sales: order metrics, revenue growth, top-selling products
- Customer: acquisition, retention, satisfaction rates
- Website: traffic sources, conversion rates, site speed, errors
Operational Shopify dashboards are highly customized, built in flexible tools like Google Sheets or Looker Studio to enable data cleaning, blending, annotations, and integrating multiple sources.
How to build a Shopify dashboard?
To build a Shopify dashboard, connect your data sources, choose a template on Looker Studio or Sheets, build your queries by selecting metrics and dimensions, choose charts to visualize your data, customize the dashboard, design and share via link, PDF or email.
Here’s the breakdown:
Connect data sources
Define and connect the data sources to bring to your dashboard. Common sources are Shopify Analytics for store performance, Google Analytics for web analytics, CRM for customer data, and Facebook Ads for marketing performance.
To connect your data sources, go to portermetrics.com, choose the data sources to bring to your dashboard.
You can follow these tutorials on connecting your data:
Choose a template
Choose from dozens of Shopify dashboard templates in Google Sheets or Looker Studio, designed for use cases like sales monitoring, inventory management, customer analysis, and marketing performance.
Learn to copy Looker Studio templates.
While templates are the starting point. Make them specific for your business or agency. Map your specific metrics, especially custom conversions, CRM contact data, Shopify events, and all the fields and metrics that you define as "conversions" and "revenue".
Depending on your reporting tool—Google Sheets or Google Looker Studio, pick any of the dozens of templates created by our team and customers to solve your Shopify reporting use cases, such as sales monitoring, inventory management, customer analysis, and marketing performance.
Select metrics, dimensions, and charts
Once your dashboard template is downloaded, you may 1)modify it or 2) create a blank page to build it from scratch. Whatever the case, setting up a query always follows these steps:
- Select the data source and the account connected to it
- Choose metrics (e.g. Sales, orders, Sessions, AOV, etc.).
- Choose breakdowns to segment your data (e.g. by date, product name, customer segment, etc.)
You can follow these tutorials on adding data to your dashboards
Design
To make your Shopify dashboards truly white-label you can add logos, colors, fonts, and styling to mirror your brand.
Follow these tutorials to design your Shopify dashboards:
Share
Share your Shopify dashboards via links, PDF, schedule emails, and control permissions.
KPIs to include in a Shopify dashboard?
Shopify dashboards should include a mix of sales, customer, inventory, efficiency, effectiveness, revenue, and cost metrics and KPIs to fully understand the performance of your store towards business goals. They include:
Sales KPIs measure the buying process, regardless of the channel:
- Sales metrics: total sales, average order value, number of orders
- Customer metrics: new vs returning customers, customer lifetime value, churn rate
- Inventory metrics: stock levels, turnover rates, out-of-stock items
Efficiency KPIs compare your store outputs to the cost, including:
- Sales: cost per sale
- Customer: cost per acquisition
- Inventory: holding costs
Effectiveness KPIs compare the input with the output from one stage to another
- Sales: conversion rate
- Customer: retention rate
- Inventory: sell-through rate
Revenue and cost KPIs show the bottom-line impact of your store performance:
- Revenue: total revenue, revenue growth
- Cost: operating expenses, marketing spend
- Efficiency: ROI, profit margin
- Effectiveness: average order value, customer lifetime value
To analyze these Shopify KPIs, segment them by:
- Channel: online store, POS, social media
- Time: Hourly, daily, weekly, monthly
- Region: country, state, city
- Customer: demographics, behavior, purchase history
- Marketing: campaign, source, medium
