Many marketing tactics start out by trying new things to see if they attract customers and then doubling-down on the ones that do.
Shopify has a ton of difference sales channels that you can use to attract customers. I’d bet for your store, three of them are really good, another five are profitable, and the rest aren’t worth messing with.
The problem is, which are the good channels?
What works for someone else might not work for you.
Shopify has some reports to help get a unified picture of which channels perform best, but that’s based on where the orders come in from. The Facebook channel for example would just show you the orders that come in from Facebook. But what if a customer comes in from Facebook and then orders a second time from your list? Or directly from your store?
That’s a customer acquired from Facebook with multiple repeat orders, but the Facebook channel only gets credit for the first one.
That’s why following the acquisition source throughout your reports is important. Great channels will acquire you customers and then shift customer purchases to your earned and low/no-cost channels (e.g. online store, email, seo). Advertising channels might not like that (less ad money for them) but you shouldn’t need to keep paying to reach a customer you’ve already acquired.
Shopify doesn’t surface the original acquisition source in their reports but Repeat Customer Insights does. That makes long-term channel performance easier to measure.
Because you really need to find those sales channels that work the best.
Eric Davis
Use cohorts to find out who the best customers are in your Shopify store
Repeat Customer Insights will automatically group your customers into cohorts based on when they first purchased. This will let you see how the date customers bought would impact their behavior.
