How do you know if you're seeing the whole picture when it comes to your ecommerce analytics? Our CEO Edward Upton joined Keith Matthews, founder of Milk Bottle Labs, on their Shopify podcast to share how stores can conquer their data dilemmas and achieve exponential growth using accurate metrics.

Listen to the full episode: Episode #48: Fix your analytics with Littledata

As Shopify experts, Milk Bottle understands the critical role that analytics play in building a successful Shopify store. They're Ireland's only fully dedicated Shopify agency, but like many of our Shopify agency partners at Littledata, they help clients from around the world find the tools and information needed to craft the best Shopify store possible.

During their chat, Edward and Keith discuss:

What does Littledata show that Shopify's analytics dashboard doesn't?

Early in the episode, Edward and Keith discuss why a store should add Littledata in the first place. The answer? It gives you critical information about the customer journey that Shopify's analytics dashboard doesn't.

As Edward explains, Shopify's dashboard "does give you all the basics, like which products are sold, how many, how much you earned. But the problem is that it doesn't really give you enough detail on the actual customer journey to do serious conversion rate optimization or any sort of marketing mix analysis.

So you just don't get deep enough about what series of events led up to an order and what were the different customer touchpoints. Yeah, you can see the last click that pulled (a customer) to an order. But, if someone buys a thousand-dollar couch, they don't just click on a Google ad and pay. It's a very considered decision, typically 15 or so touchpoints on average before someone would make a purchase.

So knowing the last thing that pulled the customer there is almost useless. What you need to do is look at the whole journey in the marketing mix, all the different kinds of prospecting, retargeting, and engagement campaigns that got them to the eventual sale. And this is true for subscription e-commerce businesses, as well. It's very unlikely to be a sort of impulse purchase."

How do cookie-blocking policies like GDPR affect Shopify store owners?

New privacy policies like the EU's GDPR and California's Consumer Protection Act (CCPA) have restricted the ability for store owners to use cookies that track important customer activity. While the industry has been hurrying to adjust, Edward says that Littledata's server-side tracking is a strong solution for compliance.

"Apple's basic belief — and I think Google's a bit on the fence, but may go down that path for Chrome as well — is that basically by default, users shouldn't be tracked. That as much of the sort of analytics-type tracking should be blocked as possible, which from the store owner's point of view is a disaster.

Because, yeah, they don't want to track personal information about the user necessarily, but they do want to know in aggregate, 'how is my store performing?' and what [advertising] spend leads to sales. I think this is driving more and more stores into our arms because Littledata offers something quite different, which is server-side tracking, which doesn't rely on any of these. It bypasses these browser limitations."

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The Shopify podcast that helps you supercharge your store's analytics tracking

Edward and Keith's conversation is filled with actionable insights that Shopify store owners can implement straight into their marketing efforts.

Listen to the full episode to see how you can apply their advice to your store, or reach out to set up a demo with Littledata and learn how our powerful data connecters can springboard your ecommerce sales.

After all, what good is a data-driven decision without accurate — or complete — ecommerce data?