So before we start talking about the free traffic techniques themselves, there are two things that
we want to set up, the first of which is analytics, so that we can understand where our visitors are
going to be coming from and then what they're doing once they're on our site.
And then secondly, when they're on our site, we want to be able to capture their email address, because
as you're going to see later on in the course, email is an incredibly effective way of boosting your
sales almost for free.
So let's now focus on the first of those, which is analytics.
And you can see that I've already come straight to the analytics section.
And it's here that Shopify really has done almost all of the hard work for us, because behind the scenes,
they have an amazing analytics system that is constantly monitoring many of the key metrics.
And while that is absolutely fantastic, it can also be a little bit overwhelming.
And you might feel that straight away because as you can see, we have reports for total sales, sales
by channel, online store sessions, online store conversion rate, total orders, average order value.
Let me scroll down a bit to see some more top selling products, customer cohort analysis, returning
customer rate, etc. etc. there are tons and tons of analytics reports.
So first things first, don't panic.
We do not need all of these analytics reports.
And in fact, when you're just getting started as we are, we really only need three of these reports
to tell us almost everything that we need to know.
The first of which of course, is the very first one, total sales.
And it's arguably the most exciting one, because as we start driving traffic to our store and making
more and more sales, they are all going to be reported here.
I can almost guarantee that the total sales report is going to become your favorite.
And then in addition to the total sales report, let me scroll down a bit further here to show you the
two others which are extremely important.
The first of which is sessions by Traffic source.
And if I hover over this, you can see that this report is going to show us exactly where all of our
traffic is coming from, and it's going to break it down by the actual traffic source itself.
So we might be getting traffic from Google or perhaps from email, or maybe social media, or perhaps
in the future, a paid traffic source such as Facebook.
All of that information is going to be reported here so that you can see very quickly which traffic
source is bringing you the most traffic.
Now, having said that, while a traffic source that brings us lots of traffic is very important, ultimately
we want to know if that traffic is going to convert into sales because as you know, we are building
a real business.
We are here to make money.
And ultimately that's what really matters.
But fear not, because of course, Shopify has us covered with the third analytics report that I want
to show you, which is, of course, sales by traffic source.
And this report, as you would expect, is going to show you the sales broken down by traffic source
so that you can see immediately which traffic source is bringing you the most sales.
And I've no doubt that straight away you can appreciate how powerful this report can be.
But in fact, it's these two reports in combination, both the sessions by traffic source and the sales
by traffic source, that can really help us understand our traffic and ultimately boost our sales.
And therefore, it's these two reports in combination, of course, with the total sales report that
I really want you to focus on, especially in the beginning.
Now, for each of these reports, if we so wish, we can get more detail.
And you can see that for each one we have this little icon here.
And when I hover over it, it says view report.
And when I click on it, first of all, you'll notice that I'm now on the reports section of analytics.
And secondly, in this example you can see that it's giving me more information such as the referrer
source, the referrer name, even the city where it came from, the number of visitors and sessions,
all very valuable information when we're trying to determine exactly where our traffic is coming from.
And then since we're on the report section, and I know that we looked at this before when we were looking
at the web performance report, but if I click into this and then if I scroll down through these multitudes
of reports, here is the sessions by refer report that we were just looking at.
And then going up a bit.
You see sales by traffic referrer, which of course is our third key report.
And then just for completeness, going right down to the bottom here, you see the web performance report
that we looked at several lectures ago.
And that means that you now understand where to find all of the key information for the traffic that
you're soon going to be sending to your store, and how Shopify allows us to easily analyze all of that
information in a simple, yet incredibly powerful way.