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WooCommerce Analytics
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Analytics is the reporting side of your shop. It answers “how much did we sell, of what, and when”. It is not the same thing as the Orders list, which is your operational to-do list of individual orders to pack and post. The two are built from different data and they will not always agree, which is normal and explained below.
What is worth your time, monthly. Three reports, ten minutes: Revenue for the trend, Products for what is actually selling, and Coupons if you ran a promotion. Everything else is there for when you have a specific question. Nobody needs to read all eleven reports, and treating this as a dashboard to check daily tends to produce anxiety rather than decisions.
Where it is
In the left-hand menu of your dashboard, Analytics sits just below WooCommerce. Opening it lands you on Overview, and the rest of the reports are listed underneath.
What each report answers
| Report | The question it answers |
|---|---|
| Overview | How is the shop doing overall, in a few headline numbers and a chart. |
| Revenue | What did we take, day by day, and how does that compare to before. |
| Orders | How many orders, and what was the average order worth. |
| Products | Which items sold, and how many of each. The most useful report in here. |
| Variations | Which size, colour or weight of a product sold, rather than just the product. |
| Categories | Which parts of the range are carrying the shop. |
| Coupons | Did that discount code get used, and what did it cost you. |
| Taxes | Tax collected, broken down. Useful at filing time. |
| Downloads | Only relevant if you sell downloadable files. |
| Stock | What is running low or has run out. |
| Customers | Who has bought, how often, and how much they have spent in total. |
The date range is the control that matters
Every report is governed by the date picker at the top of the screen, and misreading it is the most common way people come away with a wrong number.
- Click the date range at the top. You get presets such as Month to date, Last month, Quarter to date and Year to date, plus a Custom tab for any two dates you like.
- Notice the comparison setting beside it. Out of the box, reports compare the current month against the same period a year earlier. That is a deliberate choice, because comparing December to November tells you about Christmas rather than about your business.
- Read the little percentages accordingly. A figure like “up 23%” always means up against the comparison period, never up against zero.
- The range and comparison stay put as you move between reports, so if Products looks oddly quiet, check you are not still on a single day from earlier.
Why Analytics and your Orders list disagree
They are supposed to differ, for three reasons. First, Analytics ignores orders that are pending, cancelled or failed, because those are not sales. The Orders list shows you every one of them. Second, refunds are subtracted in Analytics, so a refunded order quietly reduces last month’s revenue. Third, Analytics reads its own summary tables, which are filled in by a background job, so something changed in the last few minutes may not have landed yet. If a total looks wrong, check it against those three before assuming a fault.
If a difference still does not add up after that, send us the report, the date range and the figure you expected. Numbers that genuinely do not reconcile are worth us looking at, and it is occasionally a real problem.
Getting the numbers out
Every report has a Download option that gives you a CSV file, which opens in Excel, Numbers or Google Sheets. Two things to know:
- It exports what is currently on screen, meaning the date range and any filters you have applied. It is not a dump of everything.
- It is the right way to send figures to a bookkeeper or accountant. Screenshots of charts are not, because they cannot be checked or added up.
When to email us instead
- A total that still looks wrong after checking statuses, refunds and the date range.
- Reports that are empty, or that stop at a date in the past. That usually means the background job that builds them has stalled, and it is ours to fix.
- Anything on the Analytics Settings screen. Those settings decide which order statuses count as sales for the entire shop, and changing them silently rewrites every report you have ever looked at. Ask us first.
- You want a number this does not produce, such as profit, or sales by region. Tell us the question rather than hunting for a report, because sometimes the answer is a different tool.
For the click-by-click detail of every column and filter, WooCommerce maintain their own documentation, which is always more current than ours. This page is the part they do not cover: what to look at, and what the numbers actually mean for your shop.
What we need if something fails
Which report, the exact date range showing at the top, the figure you are seeing and the figure you expected. If it is a difference against the Orders list, say so, because that has a short list of likely causes.
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