Acquisition reports

Acquisition reports show you information about how visitors come to your store. The following acquisition reports are available:

When you open an acquisition report, the data is up to date, give or take a few seconds. You can reopen or refresh the report to show newer data.

Acquisition reports are different from the Total sales by referrer report because acquisition reports do not show converted sales or the amount of orders—just visitors to your website. These reports apply to the Online Store sales channel only.

Comparing sessions and visitors

The number of sessions and the number of visitors are based on cookies. Cookies are small files that are stored on a shopper's device, such as a desktop or smartphone, when they visit your online store. One cookie identifies the device (the visitor). Another cookie keeps track of the length of the session.

A session ends after 30 minutes of no activity, and at midnight UTC. Because the same visitor can have multiple sessions, the number of sessions is usually higher than the number of visitors.

Example: A customer views products on your store for 20 minutes, then returns to your store 2 hours later for another 10 minutes. 2 sessions and 1 visitor are reported. If the shopper instead views your store for 5 minutes, leaves, and returns 10 minutes later, then 1 session and 1 visitor are reported.

If you want to view your online store without having it count as a session in your acquisition reports, then from your desktop Shopify admin, click the eye icon. Any other method of viewing your online store on desktop counts as a session in your reports.

If you view your online store from the Shopify app on iPhone or Android, then it counts as a session in your acquisition reports.

View your acquisition reports

You can filter your Reports list to display only Acquisition reports.

Steps:

Desktop

From your Shopify admin, go to Analytics > Reports.
Click the Category filter.
Click Acquisition to filter the reports to display only Acquisition reports.

iPhone

From the Shopify app, tap the … button, and then tap Analytics.
Tap Reports.
Tap the filter icon, and then tap Category.
Tap Acquisition to filter the reports to display only Acquisition reports.
Tap < Filter by and then X to navigate back to the filtered Reports list.

Android

From the Shopify app, tap the ☰ button, and then tap Analytics.
Tap Reports.
Tap the filter icon, and then tap Category.
Tap Acquisition to filter the reports to display only Acquisition reports.
Tap ← and then X to navigate back to the filtered Reports list.

Sessions by location

The Sessions by location report shows you the countries from which visitors are accessing your website.

Sessions by referrer

The Sessions by referrer report shows you whether your visitors are coming to your store directly, from search, or by a referral.

You can see similar information on your Analytics overview dashboard, but the Sessions by referrer report gives you more detailed insights.

Sessions over time

The Sessions over time report shows the number of visitors and sessions for the time range.

You can select a unit of time in the Group by drop-down menu to control how the data is grouped.

Your daily report might update within a 48 hour period after it's initially processed and published. This happens because your traffic data is calculated within a minute, and unwanted bot traffic can end up included in the data. Tests to determine this type of traffic are run, and can take up to 48 hours to complete. If these tests find unwanted traffic, then the unwanted data is removed from your reports.

You can compare data from different date ranges in this report.

This report is similar to the Visitors over time report, but Sessions is selected as the primary metric.

Visitors over time

The Visitors over time report displays the number of unique visitors to the online store over time. By default, the time period displayed is the last 7 days, and compares it to the data from the previous 7 days.

This report is similar to the Sessions over time report, but Online store visitors is selected as the primary metric.