Traffic Acquisition Reports

Running a successful online store requires attracting visitors who are interested in your products. Traffic acquisition reports in SHOPLINE provide valuable insights into where your customers are coming from, how they interact with your store, and ultimately, how well your marketing efforts are converting visitors into buyers.

This article will explain the different types of traffic acquisition reports available in SHOPLINE and how to interpret the data they provide. By understanding your traffic sources and customer behavior, you can make informed decisions to optimize your marketing strategies and boost your online store's performance.

You will see the most up-to-date data when you open a traffic acquisition report, which takes about 1 or 2 minutes. You can reopen or refresh the report to update data.

Completed Checkouts vs Orders

The metrics of Completed checkout and Orders are positively related but they are not the same.

The first difference is, Completed checkout counts the number of visitors (sessions), while Orders counts the number of orders. If a visitor places multiple orders, the order count exceeds the sessions.

On the other hand, Completed checkout is attributed to the time when the session is created, while Orders is attributed to the time when the order is successfully created. For example, Visitor A visits the online store at 10:00 AM today and places orders at 1:00 PM, so there is 1 session at 10:00 AM and 1 order at 1:00 PM.

Bounce Rate

Bounce rate means differently in different situations.

For stores where success relies on visitors viewing multiple pages, a high bounce rate isn't ideal. Specifically, if your home page serves as an entry to other sections like product detail pages, collections, and checkout pages, but most visitors only view the homepage, you certainly want a low bounce rate.

On the other hand, For one-page stores or those with a streamlined checkout process, such as shopping cart permalinks, a high bounce rate is expected."

Common Metrics

The table below provides the common metrics in traffic acquisition reports:

Viewing Traffic Acquisition Reports

1. From your SHOPLINE admin panel, go to Analytics > Reports.
2. Select to view any of the following traffic acquisition reports:

• • By date range
  • By channel
  • By country/region
  • By device
  • By search source

By Date Range

This report allows you to analyze trends in metrics like sessions, added to cart, reached checkout, completed checkout, etc., over a chosen period. In addition to hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly data, you can select an hour of a day, a day of a week, or a month of a year as the time unit to understand traffic patterns.

The time a visitor creates a session determines the time dimensions in this report. The common dimensions are as follows:

By Channel

This report displays metrics like sessions, added to cart, reached checkout, and completed checkout within your chosen timeframe. You can view the referrer URL from which visitors originated, including platforms like Facebook, Google, TikTok, and Bing. You can use Manage filters to refine results by landing page type, landing page path, landing page URL, as well as location dimensions like country/region and province/state. You can also use Add filters to combine conditions. The common dimensions are as follows:

By Country/Region

This report analyzes traffic based on the country/region of the visitor's IP address to help you learn traffic trends and conversion rates in different countries/regions.

By Device

This report displays the conversions of visitors using various login devices within your chosen timeframe. The common dimensions are as follows:

By Search Source

This report displays the visitor data where the referrer source is Search by default. If your main focus is on the conversions of visitors from Google or Google Ads, you can quickly view this information in the report.