Almost Entirely Shopify Data! Key Metrics to Monitor When Running Growth Initiatives

Monitoring metrics is essential when running growth initiatives for a commerce business. A well-designed monitoring framework tells you where to focus right now and whether your growth strategies are on the right track.

In this article, we introduce the metrics you should monitor on a daily basis in Shopify.

StoreHero leverages its proprietary growth platform to support business growth through detailed operations that manual processes cannot achieve and the large-scale execution of growth initiatives.
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Core Monitoring Metrics

The fundamental metrics you always check when running growth initiatives on Shopify can be viewed directly in the Shopify dashboard. The main metrics are as follows.

• Revenue
• Sessions
• Returning customers
• CVR
• Add-to-cart rate & cart abandonment rate
• Average order value
• Number of orders

Being able to check these at a glance gives you a solid understanding of the current situation, so make it a habit to review them every day. Checking daily will help you identify patterns by time of day and day of the week.

Store Traffic Efficiency

When monitoring traffic efficiency, track the following metrics broken down by channel.

• Revenue per visit
• LTV (Life Time Value)
• ROAS (Return On Advertising Spend)
• CPA (Cost per acquisition)
• CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost)
• CVR
• CPC

Merchants who are actively running paid advertising campaigns will likely be familiar with these metrics. Here is a brief overview of each.

Revenue per visit: A metric calculated as CVR x Average Order Value, representing the expected revenue per visit. If this figure does not exceed your CPC, it is difficult to sustain that traffic channel.

LTV: Customer Lifetime Value — the total profit a single customer generates over their lifetime. If this figure does not exceed your customer acquisition costs (CPA or CAC), it is difficult to sustain that traffic channel.

ROAS: A metric calculated as Revenue / Ad Spend, indicating how many times over your advertising investment is returned in revenue.

CPA: A metric calculated as Ad Spend / Number of Orders, representing the advertising cost required to acquire a single order.

CAC: A metric calculated as Total Acquisition Cost / Number of Orders, representing the total cost to acquire a single order. Unlike CPA, this includes labor costs and other expenses beyond ad spend. It takes more effort to calculate, but is necessary when evaluating the cost-effectiveness of non-advertising traffic channels such as organic search or email.

CVR: Number of Orders / Sessions — the number of sessions per order.

CPC: The advertising cost per click.

If your store-wide Revenue per visit does not exceed 100 yen, scaling through advertising is often difficult. Once it exceeds 300 yen, scaling becomes much more achievable. However, stores with a large amount of editorial content may see a lower store-wide Revenue per visit, so be sure to monitor this metric by channel.

To improve Revenue per visit, you need to increase both CVR and Average Order Value. Since significantly raising Average Order Value tends to be difficult, improving CVR is often the primary lever. For strategies that leverage LTV and CAC data, see the article below.

Engagement

CVR is strongly influenced not only by your products and store UI, but also by the level of engagement with your customers. You are much more likely to buy from a store run by someone you trust and feel connected to, right? When monitoring engagement trends, the following metrics are commonly reviewed.

• Subscriber count
• Follower count
• Active on site
• Brand search traffic volume

Here is a brief explanation of each metric.

Subscriber count: The number of newsletter sign-ups.

Follower count: The number of followers across each social media account.

Active on site: The number of store visits made by subscribers. If subscribers sign up for the newsletter but never return to the store, the Active on site metric will remain low. This can be checked in Klaviyo or Omnisend.

Brand search traffic volume: The number of visits generated by users searching for your brand name. This can be checked in Google Search Console. Users who search specifically for your brand name have higher engagement than those who arrive incidentally through non-brand search queries.

Engagement-building initiatives are often said to be difficult to evaluate for impact, but by monitoring the metrics above over the long term, you can confirm whether your efforts are producing the right results.

Growth and Decline of Loyal Customers

To sustain continuous growth in a commerce business, you need to increase the number of loyal customers. For this reason, it is important to monitor whether the number of loyal customers who purchase repeatedly is growing.

Before monitoring loyal customers, you first need to define what constitutes a loyal customer. Set a threshold based on criteria such as total purchase amount, number of orders, and products purchased within a specific time period.

Example: Purchased 30,000 yen or more, placed 2 or more orders, and purchased at least one unit of Product A within the past 6 months.

Once you have defined the criteria, monitor the number of customers who meet those conditions. For how to leverage loyal customer data in your CRM strategy, see the article below.

Best Sellers and Slow Movers

When you carry a large number of SKUs, it is important to monitor which products are selling and which are not. Key metrics for this monitoring include the following.

• Orders by product and variant
• Orders by collection, product type, and tag
• Inventory levels by product and variant
• Inventory levels by collection, product type, and tag
• Inventory turnover rate by product and variant
• Inventory turnover rate by collection, product type, and tag

When managing a large number of SKUs, tracking trends in what is and is not selling — not just at the individual product level but also by collection, product type, and tag — can often lead to valuable discoveries.

Inventory turnover rate is calculated as Cost of Goods Sold / Average Inventory Value, and indicates how many times inventory has turned over. These metrics help you understand what is selling and what is not, and inform promotional planning and purchasing decisions.

Turning Data into Action

Not just in monitoring, but in data utilization overall, the key is to connect insights to action. Simply looking at data will not drive growth. It only becomes meaningful when it leads to action.

The key to driving action is to decide in advance what action you will take in response to changes in each metric. Even if you do not define specific tactics, simply deciding what to check when a metric changes makes it much easier to move from insight to action.

Building a Monitoring and Measurement Environment with StoreHero

StoreHero supports merchants who are looking to increase sales on Shopify through the thorough execution of growth initiatives.

For monitoring and measurement, we leverage the StoreHero growth platform to provide services such as building dashboards that consolidate data from Shopify, various apps, Google Analytics, and advertising platforms, as well as configuring the event tracking required for analysis — delivering monitoring and measurement environments that are otherwise difficult to implement.

We are currently offering free store diagnoses. If you have challenges with building a measurement environment or growth initiatives in general, please feel free to contact us. Learn more about our free store diagnosis

Summary

We have introduced the core metrics to monitor when running growth initiatives on Shopify. Most of these metrics can be obtained directly from Shopify or by aggregating data within the platform.

Monitor your metrics accurately and move your growth initiatives forward without losing sight of the right direction.