Shopify analytics: what the reports show and what they miss

What's in Shopify analytics, as of October 2026

Five parts, and every plan gets all of them. Staff need the Analytics permission to open them (Shopify Help).

The Analytics dashboard

The first page under Analytics is a board of metric cards covering sales, sessions and fulfillment. Shopify says it updates within about a minute, and you can compare any date range with an earlier one (Shopify Help).

Treat it as a pulse. It tells you something moved, never why.

The reports

Analytics > Reports holds Shopify's default reports in 11 categories: acquisition, behavior, customers, finance, fraud, inventory, marketing, orders, profit, retail sales and sales (Shopify Help). A report shows 1,000 rows at most (Shopify Help).

Four are worth opening before the rest:

• Sessions by referrer: where visits come from, by channel, medium and traffic type (direct, organic or paid) (acquisition reports).
• Sessions by landing page: which pages sessions start on.
• Conversion rate breakdown: sessions with cart additions, sessions that reached checkout, sessions that completed checkout.
• Searches with no results: what people typed into your store's search and didn't find (behavior reports).

Which plan gets which reports

All of them, on every plan. Shopify's pricing page has one analytics line, "200+ real-time reports, plus custom analytics", ticked from Basic to Plus (Shopify pricing). The help center says creating a new data exploration "is available to merchants on all Shopify plans" (Shopify Help).

Older guides still say otherwise. Polar's July 2026 guide puts ShopifyQL custom reports on "Advanced and Plus plans" (Polar). Shopify's own pages don't, and its new analytics has been the default for every store since 11 June 2025 (Shopify changelog).

Custom reports and ShopifyQL

Open any report, change its metrics, dimensions or filters, and save it as your own. Each report also has a ShopifyQL editor, Shopify's query language for commerce. If you'd rather not write queries, Shopify suggests asking Sidekick, its admin assistant (Shopify Help).

Here's one worth saving. It shows where each tagged campaign lands people, human sessions only:

FROM sessions
  SHOW sessions, bounce_rate, added_to_cart_rate, conversion_rate
  WHERE human_or_bot_session = 'human'
  GROUP BY utm_campaign, landing_page_path
  HAVING sessions > 50
  DURING last_month
  ORDER BY sessions DESC
  LIMIT 25

Every field is in Shopify's sessions schema (shopify.dev), and it only sees ad links with UTM tags. Claude can read your sales and orders once you connect Claude to Shopify, and GA4 through Google's Analytics MCP server.

Live View

Analytics > Live View puts your store on a map or a globe. Blue dots are recent sessions, purple dots are orders (Shopify Help). The numbers:

• Visitors right now: visitors active in the past 5 minutes.
• Total sales, sessions and orders: since midnight, in your store's time zone.
• Customer behavior: sessions in the last 10 minutes with an active cart, checking out, or purchased.

Two quirks. When Live View can't place a US visitor from their IP address, it pins them to the middle of the country, in Kansas. And Shopify filters most bots from its visitor count while other tools may not, so expect Live View and Google Analytics to disagree.

Use it to watch a launch or a sale as it happens, and the reports for trends.

Marketing and attribution: the Growth page

Marketing results now live on the Growth page of the admin: sessions, conversion rate, sales and orders attributed to marketing, ROAS and cost per acquisition. Data can take up to 24 hours to update (Shopify Help). The marketing category under Analytics > Reports adds performance by channel and by campaign (Shopify Help).

Shopify only credits what it can see: traffic with a utm_campaign parameter, and data from integrated marketing apps. The default model is last non-direct click. You can switch to last click, first click, any click or linear.

How Shopify counts a session and a conversion

Shopify changed the rules between 21 and 23 September 2026 (Shopify Help):

• A session ends after 30 minutes of inactivity, no longer at midnight UTC.
• Sessions without a pageview count, like someone who lands straight in checkout.
• Identified bots are left out of session reports by default.

Conversion rate is the share of online store sessions that resulted in a sale. Bounce rate is the share that ended after one pageview (Shopify Help). "Reached checkout" needs a key press or click inside checkout, so someone who opens checkout and closes it without touching anything isn't counted there.

Orders and sales didn't move with the update. Rates did. So compare late September onward with late September onward, and read what's a good Shopify conversion rate for how that shifts the benchmark. Session history only goes back to 1 October 2022 (Shopify Help).

What the reports miss

What each ad paid for the visitors who stayed

Put a utm_content value on every ad and Shopify can count sessions, bounces and orders per ad. Two things stay hidden. Bounce rate counts every one-page visit, so someone who read your landing page for two minutes and left looks the same as a thumb that slipped on a Reel. And the sessions data carries no ad spend, so nothing puts each ad's cost next to the visitors who actually stayed.

That pairing is what ranks ads. Meta reports the click, Shopify the session and the order, and the answer only shows once the two are joined ad by ad.

What people did on the page

Shopify's session data stops at the pageview. The engagement fields are pageviews, pageviews per session and average session duration (shopify.dev). No scroll depth, no taps, no clicks on the size picker. A 90% bounce rate says people left. It can't say whether they ever saw the price.

That takes a heatmap or replay tool (our Shopify picks). The other tools that fill Shopify's gaps are sorted by job in ecommerce analytics tools.

Bots that look like buyers

Shopify built its bot filter to be cautious. Its help center says "it's better to miss some bots than incorrectly label real customers as bots", and that "some automated traffic is completing checkouts" (Shopify Help). It only classifies data from 7 October 2025 on. A filtered report is cleaner, and it still has bots in it.

We hit the ad-side version on anry.io. A 7-ad Meta creative test we started on 19 October 2026 logged its first 8 "conversions", and every one was Meta's own ad-review traffic: visits from data-centre towns, some dressed up as Instagram's and Facebook's in-app browsers. Real taps on our trial button from those ads: zero. anry.io isn't on Shopify, so this came from our own tracker. Meta says its crawler runs security and integrity checks on links (Meta for Developers), so when a new ad's first conversions come from data-centre towns, check them before you scale. For the bot waves that hit Shopify stores directly, see traffic but no sales.

Where Anry fits

Shopify's reports stay your record of what sold. Anry covers the stretch between the ad and the order. It follows each Meta or Google ad click to the visit and the order, finds the ad, page or device where paid visitors fall away, and prices each leak in your own orders. Its get_campaign_spend tool puts Meta's spend, clicks and impressions next to the sessions and orders counted on your site, per campaign or per ad. It's read-only and runs in Claude, Claude Code or Cursor.

If you don't run paid ads yet, you don't need it. Shopify's reports and a free replay tool cover you, and the CRO check order shows where to point them.

Frequently asked questions

Is Shopify analytics free?

Yes. Every plan from Basic to Plus includes the dashboard, the default reports, custom reports and Live View at no extra cost. Staff accounts need the Analytics permission to see them.

Which Shopify plan has custom reports?

All of them, as of October 2026. Shopify's help center says data explorations are available on all plans. Guides that say Advanced or Plus are describing the analytics Shopify replaced in June 2025.

What does Shopify Live View show?

Visitors active in the last 5 minutes, sales, sessions and orders since midnight, and how many sessions had an active cart, were checking out or bought in the last 10 minutes. Open it from Analytics > Live View.

How does Shopify count a session?

As one visit to your online store. Since late September 2026 it ends after 30 minutes of inactivity instead of at midnight UTC, visits without a pageview count, and identified bots are filtered out by default.

Where are the marketing reports in Shopify?

On the Growth page, plus the marketing category under Analytics > Reports. They credit traffic with UTM parameters and data from connected marketing apps, using last non-direct click unless you choose another model.

Sources

• Shopify analytics, Analytics dashboard, Reports and Default reports, Shopify Help Center
• Acquisition reports, Behavior reports and Marketing reports, Shopify Help Center
• Create a new data exploration, Using ShopifyQL and Updates from the previous analytics, Shopify Help Center
• Live View, Shopify Help Center
• Measuring marketing performance, Shopify Help Center
• Session measurement update, Analytics fields and Bot filtering, Shopify Help Center
• Sessions schema, ShopifyQL docs
• Shopify pricing and New analytics is now the default, Shopify, June 2025
• Shopify analytics guide, Polar Analytics, July 2026
• Meta web crawlers, Meta for Developers