Stop Skewing Your Shopify Stats: Filtering Out Your Own Activity

Why Your Own Activity Messes Up Your Shopify Data

Ever feel like your Shopify reports are a bit... off? You're browsing your store, adding things to your cart to test, and generally poking around to make sure everything's working. But all that activity gets tracked, skewing your sales data, conversion rates, and other key metrics. It's a common problem, and one that Janadabagma brought up in the Shopify Community recently.

Janadabagma asked about a way to remove their own data from Shopify reports, mentioning how their own testing was manipulating the values. It's a valid concern! You want to see what real customers are doing, not just your own behind-the-scenes tinkering.

The Community's Solution: Filtering is Your Friend

Fortunately, there are a few ways to tackle this. Maximus3 jumped in with a great suggestion: using Shopify's built-in reporting tools to create custom reports with filters. This is probably the most straightforward approach.

Creating Custom Reports with Filters

Here's how you can filter out your own activity using Shopify's reporting features, based on Maximus3's suggestion:

1. Go to your Shopify admin and navigate to "Analytics" > "Reports."
2. Click "Create custom report."
3. Choose the type of report you want to create (e.g., sales, sessions).
4. Now comes the important part: adding filters. Click "Add filter."
5. You can filter by various criteria to exclude your own data. Here are a few ideas:
   • Session City: If you're always accessing your store from the same city, filter out sessions from that city (e.g., "Session city is not [Your City]").
   • Customer: If you've made test purchases using your own customer account, filter out that specific customer (e.g., "Customer is not [Your Name/Email]").
6. Customize the report further by adding columns and metrics that are important to you.
7. Save your report. Give it a descriptive name like "Sales - Excluding My Activity" so you can easily find it later.

By using these filters, you can create reports that give you a much clearer picture of your actual customer behavior.

Beyond Filtering: Other Considerations

While filtering is a great starting point, there are a few other things to keep in mind:

• IP Address Filtering (More Advanced): While not directly available in Shopify's standard reporting, some more advanced analytics tools (like Google Analytics, which you can integrate with Shopify) allow you to filter out traffic based on IP address. This can be useful if you have a static IP address.
• Consider a Staging Environment: For major testing, consider setting up a staging or development environment. This is a separate, non-live version of your store where you can make changes and test features without affecting your live data.
• Be Mindful of Team Members: If you have other team members accessing the store, you might need to consider their activity as well. The same filtering techniques can be applied to exclude their data if necessary.

The Takeaway: Clean Data, Clear Insights

Ultimately, the goal is to get a clear and accurate view of your store's performance. By taking a few simple steps to filter out your own activity, you can ensure that your reports reflect the behavior of your actual customers, leading to better decision-making and a more successful business. It's great that Janadabagma raised this point because it's something many store owners don't think about initially. And thanks to Maximus3 for pointing out the filtering capabilities within Shopify's reports – a really helpful solution!