2 min read

WooCommerce Reports

WooCommerce Reports

WooCommerce has an awesome reporting module. But can we out-awesome it? We think so.

First, let’s look at what WooCommerce comes with. Head to WooCommerce > Reports in the backend and you can access them.

Reports are broken down into:

  • Sales
  • Customers
  • Stock
  • Taxes

You filter by date and export to a CSV.

What’s missing in standard WooCommerce Reports

One of the main problems is the lack of Google Analytics data. The holy trinity of ecommerce reporting are your:

  • Visits (sometimes known as Sessions)
  • Order value (of your average customer)
  • Conversion rate (that’s to say what percentage of your visits place an order).

Standard WooCommerce reports use just the order data from the WooCommerce module. They don’t show how these metrics work together.

That’s why built the grow module. This is the equation that we think should lie at the heart of your reporting:

Revenue = Visits x Average Order Value x Conversion Rate

Head to our Grow Getting Started Guide to learn some more about these metrics and how they can inform your marketing strategy.

Data overload

The built-in WooCommerce reports show you all the data and graph it, but leave you to interpret the data. Without the session data from Google analytics this doesn’t show you the whole picture.

It’s easy to get overwhelmed by too much data. We’ve looked at this before and provided a Google spreadsheet we use to get meaningful analysis from the data. Head to our ROI report post to see more.

Other WooCommerce Report plugins out there

There are a host of reporting extensions for WooCommerce but many suffer from data overload. Lots of data and little actionable advice from it.

What do we mean by actionable advice? We mean being able to set your targets for the month and then having a regular update about how these metrics are performing. What’s performing well and what’s under performing. With that data you can make decisions about where to focus your energies.

That’s why we’ve built our Grow for WooCommerce plugin which is free to download from the WordPress.org repository.

New email report coming to Grow

We’re improving our premium module all the time. At the moment we are focusing on two elements:

  • Channel reporting – showing your metrics filtered by the following traffic channels:
    • SEO (or Organic Traffic)
    • PPC (or Paid Traffic)
    • Social (traffic from Facebook, twitter etc..)
  • Email Reports – Weekly updates with a summary of progress. Below are the early mockups for this email report. Please leave feedback in the comments.

The Grow WooCommerce Report
Our initial mockup of the emailed WooCommerce report

Developers and Freelancers

When working for a client it can be hard to demonstrate the true value of what you are doing. Sometimes clients can become frustrated to pay for your time when they do not understand how this benefits them. Clients need to see a good return on investment.

We are building with this in mind. We are looking at adding a summary field to outline development work completed and how this will improve the site.

If you have any feedback how we can improve our reports to better communicate development value, please drop us a note in the comments. Thanks!