Store
New customers
The Customers page of a store: what makes an order new, returning or unknown, cohorts, repeat rate, and lifetime value by first product and first channel.
The Customers page tells new customers from returning ones: how many first orders the period brought, how many orders came from people who had bought before, how many of them come back, and what a customer is worth over time. This page explains how each number is found.
The date range and the comparison apply to everything but the cohorts. Filters do not. The model menu decides one thing only here, the first channel of a customer: see Attribution models.
New, returning or unknown #
Telling customers apart needs the customer key. When Match sales to ads is on, each Shopify order from a customer the store can identify is stored with a private key made from that customer. The key is never the email or the customer id, and two orders from the same customer get the same key.
Each order of the period is then one of three:
- New. The earliest order ever of its customer key. When two orders share the earliest moment, the one recorded first is the new one.
- Returning. Any later order of the same key, even when the first order was placed long before the period.
- Unknown. An order without a key: placed while the switch was off, or from a customer the store could not identify.
Nothing is stored about an order being new. Each report works it out again from the keys, so an order keeps its place when you change the period.
The tiles #
Six tiles sum up the period: New customers, Returning customers, Returning share, Repeat rate, Days to second order and Revenue from returning.
- Returning share is the returning orders out of the new and returning ones. Unknown orders are left out.
- Repeat rate takes the customers whose first order is in the period, and counts how many of them have ordered two times or more, up to today. A customer who first bought before the period counts in neither part.
- Days to second order is the middle value of the days between the first and the second order, over those same customers who came back.
The New and returning card draws the orders of the two kinds over the period, returning below and new above, and switches between orders and revenue.
Cohorts #
A cohort is the customers whose first order fell in the same week or month. The Cohorts card has one row per cohort: when it started, how many customers it has, and then the share of them who ordered in each period after the first. The first column is always all of them. A darker cell means more customers came back. Hover a cell for the number of customers and the revenue behind it. Periods that have not happened yet are left blank.
Cohorts are weekly until the store has 180 days of orders, about six months, and monthly after that. A weekly table shows the last 8 weeks, starting on Monday, and a monthly one the last 6 months. The card title says which you are looking at. The cohorts ignore the date range of the top bar: they always show the most recent weeks or months, so the table is full.
Lifetime value #
Two cards rank customers by what they first bought and by how they first came:
- Lifetime value by first product. Customers grouped by the product of their first order.
- Lifetime value by first channel. Customers grouped by the channel the model credits for their first order.
Each row shows the customers, their orders per customer, the lifetime value, the repeat rate and the average first order. The lifetime value is all the money those customers have spent with the store, every order ever, divided by the customers. Rows are sorted by lifetime value, highest first. On a phone one of the two is open at a time.
A product with a high lifetime value brings customers who come back. A channel with a high one is worth more than its first order suggests, which matters when you compare it with what that channel's ads cost.
When every order is unknown #
A store whose orders carry no customer key cannot tell new from returning. The page then says to turn on Match sales to ads under Settings, Integrations, and still shows the orders of the period. Orders recorded before the switch was on keep no key, so the split starts from the day you turn it on.