Shopify, GA4 and your ad platforms give you hundreds of metrics. Most of them don’t need your attention every week. These twelve Shopify KPIs do: together they tell you whether you’re attracting the right visitors, converting them, making money on them, and keeping them. For each one, here is where to find it, how it’s calculated, and how to read a change.
A note on “normal”: benchmarks vary enormously by product, price and country. The most useful comparison is your own store, week over week and against the same week last year.
The weekly scorecard
| # | KPI | Where to find it | Question it answers |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Net sales | Shopify Analytics | How much did we really sell? |
| 2 | Orders | Shopify Analytics | How many purchases? |
| 3 | Average order value | Shopify Analytics | How much per purchase? |
| 4 | Sessions | Shopify or GA4 | How many visits? |
| 5 | Conversion rate | Shopify or GA4 | How many visits buy? |
| 6 | Add-to-cart rate | Shopify or GA4 | Do product pages convince? |
| 7 | Checkout completion rate | Shopify or GA4 | Does the checkout lose buyers? |
| 8 | Marketing efficiency ratio (MER) | Shopify sales ÷ total ad spend | Is marketing paying overall? |
| 9 | New customer acquisition cost | Ad spend ÷ new customers | What does a new customer cost? |
| 10 | Returning customer rate | Shopify Analytics | Do customers come back? |
| 11 | Refund and return rate | Shopify Analytics | Are sales sticking? |
| 12 | Tracking capture rate | GA4 purchases ÷ Shopify online orders | Can we trust the other numbers? |
Sales
1. Net sales
Gross sales minus discounts and returns. Use Shopify, not GA4, for revenue: Shopify is the record of what was actually sold. Compare with the same week last year rather than last week, to remove seasonality.
2. Orders
Read it next to net sales. Sales up with orders flat means bigger baskets or higher prices; orders up with sales flat means smaller baskets, often because of discounts.
3. Average order value (AOV)
Net sales divided by orders. Watch it after price changes, free-shipping thresholds and bundles. A sudden drop often points to a promotion that worked too well on low-value products.
Traffic and conversion
4. Sessions
Shopify and GA4 count sessions differently, and both depend on consent, so pick one source and stick to it. Look at sessions by channel: total traffic hides a lot.
5. Conversion rate
Orders divided by sessions. Many online stores sit somewhere between 1% and 3%, but the range is huge. Read it by channel and device: a drop on mobile only usually means a UX or speed problem; a drop on one paid channel means a targeting or landing page problem.
6. Add-to-cart rate
Sessions with an add to cart divided by sessions. It isolates product page performance: price, photos, reviews, stock. If conversion falls but add-to-cart rate holds, the problem is further down the funnel.
7. Checkout completion rate
Orders divided by sessions that reached the checkout. A drop here after a change (new shipping rates, a new payment method, a checkout app) is your earliest warning. Shopify’s conversion funnel report shows it directly; in GA4, build a funnel exploration from begin_checkout to purchase.
Marketing efficiency
8. Marketing efficiency ratio (MER)
Total net sales divided by total ad spend across all platforms. Unlike platform ROAS, it can’t be inflated by platforms claiming the same sale twice, which is why it’s the first number I look at. Track it weekly and set a floor below which you stop scaling spend.
9. New customer acquisition cost (nCAC)
Total ad spend divided by first-time customers. It tells you what growth really costs, because most ad spend is supposed to bring new customers. Shopify’s customer reports give you new customers; the customer_type dimension on GA4 purchases helps too, if your setup sends it.
Retention and quality
10. Returning customer rate
The share of orders from customers who bought before. A healthy rate depends on your product: consumables should see far more returning customers than furniture. Watch the trend, and compare it with your email and SMS activity.
11. Refund and return rate
Returns divided by gross sales. A rising rate erases growth that looks good in net sales. Break it down by product to find sizing, quality or description problems.
12. Tracking capture rate
GA4 purchases divided by Shopify online store orders. It’s the KPI nobody tracks, and the one that tells you whether all the others are reliable. With consent, a stable rate is normal; a sudden drop means tracking broke, and your ad platforms are optimizing on incomplete data. I explain how to read it in why GA4 shows fewer purchases than Shopify.
How to run the weekly review
- Same day, same time, same date range: Monday to Sunday, reviewed on Monday.
- Start with capture rate. If tracking broke, fix that before reading anything else.
- Then sales, orders and AOV, against last year.
- Then the funnel (conversion, add-to-cart, checkout completion) to see where any change comes from.
- Then MER and nCAC, to decide on ad spend.
- Write one line per change: what moved, the likely cause, what you’ll do. After a few months, this log is more valuable than any dashboard.
Frequently asked questions
What about cart abandonment rate?
It’s the reverse of checkout completion and add-to-cart behaviour: carts created that don’t become orders. Track it if you work on cart recovery emails; checkout completion rate is the more actionable weekly number.
Which KPIs should I check daily, weekly and monthly?
Daily: sales, orders and tracking capture rate, to catch problems. Weekly: the twelve above. Monthly or quarterly: customer lifetime value, cohort retention and contribution margin.
Should I use Shopify or GA4 for conversion rate?
Pick one and stay consistent. Shopify is closer to real orders; GA4 lets you break it down by channel, campaign and landing page.
Put it in one place
Collecting twelve numbers from three tools every Monday gets old quickly. A single dashboard that combines Shopify, GA4 and ad spend does it for you: see a Looker Studio dashboard for Shopify and GA4, or compare the ready-made options in Shopify analytics tools compared.
A measurement plan (from 1,600€) defines these KPIs for your store, how each is calculated and where it comes from, so everyone reads the same numbers. Book a free 30-minute call to talk about it.