Customer behavior can be a huge wellspring of information for your Shopify store.
It can include everything a customer does and doesn't do with their relationship with your store.
The amount of data a single customer generates means you have to be selective about which data you collect, keep, and look at. A handful of customers creates enough behavior activity to overwhelm most manual analyses.
Combine that with the fact that the vast majority of customer behavior data is irrelevant or useless and it becomes clear you need a method to handle the data.
Types of customer behavior data
Often it's easier to think about what you'd do with the data and then figure out what types of behavior data could support your goals. This can dramatically reduce the amount of data needed while also making an analysis easier to perform.
Visit Data. This data about a customer's visit (physical or electronic). It might include where they came from, how long they visited, and what areas caught their interest.
Purchase Data / Order Data. This data is about the customer's orders. It includes the total amounts spent, merchandise purchased, and coupons.
Customer Lifetime Data. This data combines (aggregates) the Purchase Data for a single customer to help understand the customer as a whole. It'll include how many orders they've placed, their ordering dates, and payment methods used.
Marketing Interaction Data. This shows the customer's interactions with your marketing materials. What emails they opened and clicked, what coupons they used, and first-touch/last-touch attribute are commonly included.
Customer privacy
Any customer data has oblivious privacy implications. Careful monitoring of what data is collected vs processed vs analyzed will be needed to stay compliant with any ethical standards and laws (e.g. GDPR).
Articles for further reading
The newest articles are at the top.
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