3 Amazing New vs. Return Customer Reports in Shopify

[00:00:11] Frank: Once you have opened the report up, you're going to be looking at a graph of the number of orders, the number of first time and return customers. If you haven't built a custom Shopify report yet, the one thing you have to do is start from a base template. At least I recommend that.

[00:00:28] Frank: Otherwise you're going to be adding tons and tons of columns in and it's a bit more time consuming.

[00:00:37] Frank: Hey everyone, my name is Frank. I'm an account manager here at Solutions8 and in today's video I'm going to be covering three of my favorite Shopify reports for understanding your new versus return customer numbers. Out of those three reports, one of them is a default Shopify report and the other two are custom made.

[00:00:56] Frank: So for all three reports, I'm going to show you where to find them, how to create them, and then how to save them and use them. The first report is a standard new versus return customer report, but you can also lay in, By product to understand those metrics. And then the second report is new versus return customer AOV.

[00:01:15] Frank: And the third report is new versus return customer by sales channel. If you happen to use multiple sales channel, like a POS system alongside your online store, or maybe a meta shop integration. So let me just jump right into it. We're going to cover the default Shopify report first. And the changes I like to make to it.

[00:01:37] Frank: The report you're looking for is first time versus returning customer sales. if you don't see it, just go ahead and type that into the search bar up here. Once you have opened the report up, you're going to be looking at a graph of the number of orders.

[00:01:51] Frank: The number of first time and return customers, for those orders on the time period you select, I like to toggle none here to get rid of the graph and then change my time period selection. I'm going to change it to the last month. And so once you're in here, there's 1 other thing that you want to add, because right now we're looking at 1st time and return customers by order.

[00:02:11] Frank: Orders and total sales, but the numbers by actual customer, if that's what you're looking to get are a bit different. So I like to go to the column section and type in customers and then check that box there. first time is perfectly aligned with the number of orders and customers because a customer can't be a first time customer multiple times.

[00:02:33] Frank: But we see here returning users, we have some additional orders from them over that time period. And so what you really want to look at for accurate numbers is the customers column. from here, I also sometimes like to add in products so you can view the number of first time and return users by product to maybe find a hero products, one that's really good at acquiring new customers, which can help out big time in your paid acquisition efforts.

[00:03:02] Frank: So go ahead to the columns area and type in product. You can break it down by ID title type. Maybe if you want to look at categories or vendor, I like to do title for small stores. So I'm going to select that there. And now here you'll see a breakdown of your first time and return customers by each of the products In your Shopify store.

[00:03:21] Frank: If you want to narrow that down, maybe there's too much to look at and you wanna look at just first time or just return customers, go over to this filter icon up here. And then under this query, what you're gonna wanna do is keep customer type. But on the right hand side select. Is, and then click the search menu and then either select first time or returning from the dropdown, I'm going to select first time and then click apply filters, and now you'll only be looking at either the first time or return customers by product.

[00:03:55] Frank: And then of course you can always come back in here and remove. Product titles or other, categories, columns, such as orders. if you have the report set up exactly how you like it, and you don't want to do this every time you can actually click the save as button and then name it, whatever you'd like, and then click save.

[00:04:14] Frank: And then next time you go to the reports tab, it'll already be built exactly how you left it. So you can save yourself a bit of time. This one's one of my favorite. as you get further into your e commerce journey, understanding your AOV for different customer types becomes really important on how to drive additional sales and understanding what numbers, you can afford to pay for your, customer acquisition, understanding LTV, et cetera.

[00:04:40] Frank: So the next report we're going to be building is AOV by customer type., if you haven't built a custom Shopify report yet, the one thing you have to do is start from a base template. At least I recommend that. Otherwise you're going to be adding tons and tons of columns in, and it's a bit more time consuming.

[00:04:57] Frank: So for this report, we're going to start with the sales by channel report. So go ahead and click that from your dashboard and the analytics tab. change the columns that are selected here. So there's a few columns we need to add in. One of those is customers. So go to the right hand side in customers, select that.

[00:05:18] Frank: Next up, we're going to be adding average order value. And then as you type that in, you should see average units ordered as well. So go ahead and check both of those. Type customer and then select customer type. If you're inclined, you can get rid of the sales channel name.

[00:05:36] Frank: I'm just going to leave it in here for this report, just for ease of use. So what we have here now is a breakdown of your new versus return customers. AOV and average order units, average or units ordered by time, you can go up here and select whatever time period you want to look at. So we're going to select the last 365 days So from my online store here's my return users. Here's my first time users. Over the last year, and here's what their average order value looked like you can compare those and contrast, and you can start to understand the differences better between your new customers and your return customers.

[00:06:17] Frank: maybe you have a special offer that you run that will skew New customer AOV a bit higher. I do have a client like this who has a shipping threshold and more often than not, the new customers are the ones that work to hit that, your case may be entirely different. one thing to keep in mind is you can also filter out certain products.

[00:06:38] Frank: If you want to only view the AOV of a certain line or a certain category in your store, what you can do is go to the filter icon and then click on that. You can search for a product title, for example, and then just click the drop down and then select your product title that you want to, visualize a OV for, or you can even select a product type if you want to look at categories of products available.

[00:07:04] Frank: . If you want to clean things up a bit, you can go in here and delete the other columns, like orders, growth, sales, discounts, return. All that stuff. So you're just looking at customer type, average order value, number of units ordered, and then things are a little bit more clean.

[00:07:20] Frank: And then, the last report, whenever you have it configured, how you'd like, go ahead and click save as. Name that whatever you're going to remember and then click save. And that report will be waiting for you when you get back to the report section. the last report that we're going to build is the customer type by sales channel.

[00:07:40] Frank: So this report can be incredibly useful if you have multiple sales channels and you're really having trouble understanding. What your new versus return customer breakdown is maybe for your POS system, because if you just go into the default new versus return customer report, it's not included in there, which, sales channel they originated from.

[00:08:04] Frank: we're going to select a base report. This one is going to be sales by channel as well. So go ahead and click into their view report. And then what we're going to do in this case, we're going to get rid of everything in here, except for the sales channel name. So let's get rid of discounts, gross net sales.

[00:08:24] Frank: Let's get a returns shipping tax. And, you have to leave one other column in there by default. So we'll come back and remove that. type in customers, check that box there. now we're going to go back and it's up to you. Of course, you can layer in whatever columns you want.

[00:08:43] Frank: We're going to remove this total sales box. So right now, what we have is our time period, our sales channel name. And then our number of customers here, then you're going to go back to columns and you're going to search for customer type and go ahead and check that box there. And now you get a visual of sales channel name, whether they're a first time or returning customer and then the number of customers.

[00:09:08] Frank: you can also filter for certain customer type here. All you have to do is go to the filter icon and then type in customer type is. And then select either first time or returning from the dropdown. And then here you go, you can visualize on whatever time period you want the number of first time or return customers that came from a specific sales channel.

[00:09:31] Frank: So this was something that I personally, struggled to figure out for quite some time with one of my clients who has a POS system. An online store and integration with meta. And it was interfering with our ability to like accurately break down which channels were driving new customer growth. month over month until I found the solution.

[00:09:52] Frank: So I wanted to share it with you guys. Hopefully you found this helpful. Hopefully you found all the reports helpful. If you have any questions or run into any trouble, just leave me a comment down below and I'll do my best to respond. and also if you have any other really good reports for new versus return customers and Shopify, leave that down below as well.

[00:10:15] Frank: And I will start using those. I appreciate you guys. Thanks for watching