Conversion rates tell you how well your website is turning visitors into paying customers. Improving your conversion rate is about appealing to customer behavior and buying habits.

But getting your customers to click isn’t an easy feat, especially with all the noise online today.

Understanding your customers’ behavior can often feel like a mystery. Knowing what your site visitors are thinking can seem impossible.

You can start answering these questions by unpacking your site analytics.

In this article, you’ll find six Google Analytics and Shopify reports that unearth the information you need to increase your conversion rates and sales.

Table of contents

What is CRO in data analytics
What is a CRO analysis
Top six CRO analytics reports
CRO analysis FAQ

What is CRO in data analytics?

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) involves improving the number of visitors who take action on your website, whether that's signing up for a newsletter, filling out a form, or buying something. CRO in data analytics involves understanding how users navigate a site, what actions they take, and what's stopping them from converting.

What is a CRO analysis?

In a CRO analysis, you examine a website carefully to identify user behavior patterns and draw conclusions. The goal is to collect data, test different components, and implement changes to improve the user experience and increase conversion rates.

Say you have a 70% bounce rate and a low ecommerce conversion rate on your checkout page. Heatmaps show users spend a lot of time on the payment information section. You learn through surveys that customers find the checkout process too complicated and time-consuming.

You run an A/B test with a simplified checkout page with an express checkout option like Shop Pay and the original checkout page with all the required fields and steps. Version A outperforms version B with a 25% reduction in cart abandonment rates. So you implement Shop Pay across your website.

You monitor the checkout process's performance over time and consider further improvements, such as multiple payment options or improved mobile usability. This is how conversion optimization works continuously to improve your site’s conversion rate.

Top CRO analytics reports

Keep in mind that running these reports won’t immediately increase your conversion rates. To improve your ecommerce CRO, consider setting goals against which you can compare your site performance. Learn more about setting up goals for Google Analytics here.

1. New vs. returning visitors

The first-time versus returning customer sales report shows the value of orders placed by first-time and returning customers.

First-time customers are people who order from your ecommerce business for the first time.
A returning customer is someone who’s placed an order and already has an order history.

New traffic is exciting, but your number of returning visitors indicates that your website, product, or purchase experience left a positive impression.

Run this report in your Shopify admin by clicking Analytics > Customers > First-time vs returning customer sales.

You can select Group by to select the time unit that you want to view the total sales by in the graph:

Hour
Day
Week
Month
Quarter
Year
Hour of day
Day of week
Month of year

The key to increasing ecommerce CRO is understanding your audience and how they shop—new visitors and returning visitors have very different buying habits.

Return visitors often convert more, while a new visitor is likely browsing your site and getting familiar with your products, similar to a window shopper. Unless they came to your site via word of mouth, they might not be looking to make a purchase immediately.

Use newsletter prompts, pop-up discounts, and cart abandonment emails to engage with new visitors. If they make a purchase, great! If not, use these levers to provide a pleasant experience, build a positive relationship, and encourage them to return.

On the other hand, returning visitors are already familiar with your store and probably visiting to shop (if they haven’t already). The best way to welcome return visitors to your website is with ecommerce personalization tactics like customized product suggestions and user-generated content. Consider including the latter on your product pages alongside professional product photography.

Not only does ecommerce personalization make returning visitors feel recognized, it may cut their path to purchase in half. Plus, personalized shopping experiences have yielded up to 15% higher conversion rates.

2. Acquisition by source or medium

How does your website acquire traffic? Once people land on your site, where do they go from there?

Run this report in Google Analytics by clicking Acquisition > Traffic acquisition.

First, if any paid campaigns aren’t driving traffic, this report will show you where you can tweak your projects. Are your Google ads barely making a dent? Turn them off and reroute those efforts into organic social media or email campaigns that may attract more visitors.

Use this Google Analytics report to trace your user experience for those digital marketing campaigns driving traffic. This is particularly helpful if you see high traffic but low conversion rates.

Do all paid ads, social posts, and email campaigns match to the landing pages they link? If not—and your visitors are expecting a different product or offer—this could be the culprit of a low ecommerce conversion rate.

Another variation of this overview report is the path exploration report in Google Analytics. This provides a graphical representation of visitor traffic, from where they entered your site to what pages they visited and where they exited (which we’ll unpack next).

The path exploration report is a helpful addition to your acquisition analysis, as it identifies any loops.

“A loop occurs when visitors repeatedly navigate back and forth between two pages, such as clicking from the homepage to a product grid page then back to the homepage,” says Jon MacDonald, founder of The Good.

Loops may indicate confusion on a particular page. This insight gives you an opportunity to clear up the information and help visitors become customers.”

3. Exit pages

The pages on which your visitors choose to exit your site reveal where your user experience is lacking—or breaking altogether. While the path exploration report provides this information, we encourage you to check out the exit report to dig deeper into where your visitors left your site.

Run this report in Google Analytics by searching Exit pages [timeframe] and the Insights bar will populate on the right side of the site with relevant insights.

Review the specific pages from which visitors frequently exit. Don’t worry if your homepage is at the top of the list—that’s pretty common. If they’re product pages or high-intent pages, like a Contact Us page, review your website copy, product imagery, and customer reviews.

Examine how each page is designed. CRO expert Alex Birkett encourages businesses to review what information lives below the fold.

“Consider setting up Scroll Depth triggers in Google Analytics to see how far your visitors travel on each page,” he says. “If [visitors] are not seeing important information like pricing or calls to action, consider reorganizing the page or driving people lower with arrows, continued imagery, and compelling copy.”

Allbirds vertically displays their product photography across each product page, encouraging visitors to continue scrolling to see the rest.

If your visitors are leaving at a cart page, consider setting up a cart abandonment campaign to bring them back to your site. The average desktop cart abandonment rate is about 70%, and a simple drip email campaign can be a valuable second chance at a first impression.

Another way to mitigate cart abandonment is with a simple checkout experience. If visitors can’t find it, don’t trust it, or don’t feel like navigating through it, they likely won’t convert to customers.

Your ecommerce checkout experience directly affects the success of your store—18% of visitors abandon their cart due to a complicated checkout process. A simple one-click checkout (like Shop Pay) has been shown to increase conversion rates by 35%.

4. Sessions by device

As we acknowledged before, improving your ecommerce website CRO is about appealing to how your customers shop. One way to do this is by meeting them where they are—by understanding whether they shop on their desktop, mobile device, or tablet.

Your Sessions by Device report in Shopify shows you what devices visitors are using to access your site. You can also see a breakdown of this data on your Overview dashboard.

Fun fact: global consumer mobile spending is anticipated to reach $270 billion by 2025. Some 15% of US adults only have access to the internet via their smartphones, and over 50% of shoppers stop visiting ecommerce sites with lousy mobile experiences.

Your shopping experience matters, and the device on which your shoppers browse can directly impact whether or not they make a purchase.

Google Analytics can also help you dig deeper into how your visitors shop.

Select User > Tech and review the Users by Browser, Users by Device category and Users by Operating system reports to examine what technology your visitors use to check out your site.

You might wonder what to do with this information. “If you see very low conversion rates or super high bounce rates on certain devices, that may mean the shopper experience is broken on those devices,” says Alex. “Use a test called BrowserStack to QA your site experience through different platforms, like Android or iPhone.”

You can also manually review each browser and device UX. Visit your ecommerce store on any browsers and devices with high bounce rates and walk through the checkout process. Are all links intact? Is it easy to read your site copy or recognize your product images? Is the menu accessible? Is your site loading quickly?

If your answer is no, return to the drawing board and improve the shopping experience on these devices. You’ll see your conversion rate improve in turn.

5. Sales by product

This product performance report helps you understand campaign attributions. You can see which individual products are selling and which aren’t. As a result, you’ll know what your customers care about. Additionally, you can find out what products your customers like, so you can invest in products that convert.

For example, if you’re promoting a new product, you can track how products perform promoted versus organically. If a product does well without promotions, you can build personalized campaigns that improve conversions and marketing efforts.

6. Conversions over time

The online store conversion over time Shopify report shows the percentage of online store visitors who made a purchase over a period of time. It can help you understand how well your store is converting sessions into sales.

Say your store is selling a lot of traffic, but sales are lower than expected. You review your online store conversion over time report and group conversion rates by the month. You notice that the average conversion rate for the past month is at 5%, but a little lower than previous months.

In response, you reorganize your homepage collections and launch a new promotion to boost conversions, keeping an eye on this report to track the effectiveness of your changes.

Increase ecommerce conversion rates: better analytics, better tests

Optimizing your ecommerce website conversion rate isn’t a mystery, it just requires a healthy relationship with conversion rate optimization tools.

Start with these six reports to understand what your visitors are thinking when they visit your website. You’ll soon learn how to turn those digital window shoppers into loyal customers.

To read more about ecommerce conversion rates, check out our guide to advanced CRO tactics.

And to gain deeper insights into your customer’s shopping experience, consider working with one of our technology partners, who can save you time analyzing a large number of reports.

CRO analysis FAQ

What is CRO testing?

A CRO test involves experimenting with different elements on a website or landing page to see which changes convert the best. CRO tests involve A/B testing, multivariate testing, and user feedback to improve the user experience and increase the number of visitors who complete an action on your site.

What does CRO tell you?

A CRO report tells you how well your website or landing page converts website visitors into customers or leads. Dedicated CRO tools help you figure out which parts of your site are working well and which need improvement to make more conversions.

What is the role of a CRO analyst?

A CRO analyst’s job is to design and run experiments to optimize website performance. They collaborate with marketing, design, and development teams to implement changes and track their impact on conversion rates.

Allie Decker