How to Create a Custom WooCommerce Dashboard for Your Clients?

If you are a web development agency working with WooCommerce projects, providing your clients with analytics information that they can use to make useful, actionable decisions is something that you should add to your list right away. Providing your clients with WooCommerce client dashboards or a WooCommerce sales dashboard can step up your game.

Yes, having a good looking shop does help the user in providing a better shopping experience, and even it also helps in building the brand’s reputation. But when it comes to improving the performance and scalability, you need to have access to data which you can rely on and use to make more informed decisions for your eCommerce store.

How Can a Custom WooCommerce Dashboard Help?

WooCommerce shop owners often miss out on the most crucial aspect of having an eCommerce store, and that is having access to proper analytics. Most of the time if store owners decide to study analytics, they go with Google Analytics free version.

This is not a bad tool for calculating the performance of the e-commerce store, but it offers limited data analysis and some of the crucial elements like Checkout Behaviour Analysis. Checkout Behaviour Analysis is a much-needed metric which helps in understanding how the user flows through the website, and it also helps in identifying the bumps and blockages in your website.

Another challenge with Google Analytics is that it is not the best option for a novice user. If a user does not know their way around Google Analytics, it will be difficult for them to make future projections and plans as it would be a challenge to get the required data.

So, what else can be done?

If you are looking for a better option or an alternative to taking data from WooCommerce, you can use another fantastic tool which provides you with excellent functionality and data reports. The tool I am talking about is Metorik – check our Metorik Review.

Metorik offers great in-depth reports which even a novice user can understand and learn from. One of the best features of Metorik among many others is that you can customize the WooCommerce dashboard with the simple drag and drop and editing process.

In this article, we will look at how you can create a custom WooCommercer dashboard for your clients, which they can use to analyze the performance of their WooCommerce store.

Creating a Custom WooCommerce Sales Dashboard for your Clients using Metorik

For this tutorial, you will require a live WooCommerce shop and a Metorik account. Metorik offers various plans and pricing, but if you are trying it out, you can sign up for Metorik’s free thirty days trial.

Go to Metorik

Connecting with Metorik is pretty straightforward, but it can take a couple of minutes to share data. Once you have your store and Metorik connected, we can begin with the process!

To begin with, Metorik includes some default layouts for your WooCommerce dashboard. For example, if you sell subscriptions with WooCommerce, you will see a tab at the top with subscription options. If you have set up Google Analytics with your store, Metorik will display conversion rate, visitors information, etc.

Let’s first understand the default layouts.

Default WooCommerce Dashboard Layouts

The first tab you will see on the Metorik WooCommerce Dashboard is the Default Layout. It covers data like Net revenue, orders, customers data, refunds data, Google Analytics data, KPIs, subscription stats, and custom segmented data regarding customer activity. It will be a mix of all the cards that you can create with Metorik.

The second default dashboard you will see is the Customers layout. This layout displays new customers you have acquired in the selected period, how many unique visitors you are getting, Segments displaying average LTV or lifetime value of registered customers, and the ones checked out as guests. You also get access to other segments like the one showing the activities of repeat customers such as total orders, LTV or Lifetime Value, etc.

The third default dashboard you will see is Subscriptions. This focuses on subscription activity only. You can see how many new subscriptions you are getting, how many renewal orders you are receiving. You can also see how many subscriptions are active currently and how what is the total MRR and ARR for the selected time.

Moreover, you can also view the data of how many subscriptions you have to date using the “all-time” filter. There are further segments as well which tells which subscription will be renewed in the next x number of days and how many have been canceled in the past X number of days.

Customizing WooCommerce Dashboard

Now we know what a typical default Metoric dashboard for WooCommerce looks like. It is good, but since we are using Metorik, the number of dashboard customizations you get with this plugin is yet to be explored, and it is super easy to do!

Let’s see how you can customize the layouts, to only display the information our client needs.

For this, you need to start with switching back to the default layout and then clicking the customize button/link at the top right corner of the analytics dashboard.

Once you do that, you will see that all the cards will become editable and you can add, delete, and edit the cards you wish to modify or remove. At the bottom of the dashboard, you will also see an option to add a new card which you can add quickly and place as per your needs.

Since we are creating a client WooCommerce dashboard, we can remove the ones which are not required for the clients. Let’s start by deleting the Conversion rate card, unique visitors card, or any card that you think will be irrelevant to your client.

To delete a card, click on the dustbin icon on the card and it will automatically remove the card from your custom dashboard. You can even remove the headings that you find out the cards; they can be added again as well, which we will see further in the tutorial. Feel free to delete the cards you think are unnecessary and if you want to go all in, you can remove all the cards and start from scratch! With Metorik, it will barely take minutes to add cards to your custom Dashboard layout.

Creating a New Dashboard layout

When you click on the Customize button on the top right corner, you will see the options and dialogue box to save that specific layout. You can save your custom layout at any step. It will save a layout with the cards and headings you have added and removed, and then you can further customize the layout by clicking on the same Customize button later.

To save a layout, enter a suitable name in the field and select who has access to this layout, you can share it with the whole team, or you can keep it private just for your insights. Once you are done, click on Save as New button and you will see your layout in the top.

Understanding and Adding Cards

Layouts are made up of cards which offers the users insights into your WooCommerce store. The cards typically include the following:

• Reports
• KPIs
• Subscription Stats
• Segment Total(s)
• Segment lists
• Headings

When you click on Add a New Card, you will see the option to choose the card type, you will find: reports, segment lists, segment total(s), KPIs, subscriptions, and heading. There might be more cards in the future as the tool grows. Let’s see each card type in a little detail.

Reports

Reports provide starts like net revenue, new customers, net sales, orders, sales, refunds, etc. You can add a new card by clicking on the add card button at the bottom and selecting the type as “Report.” Now choose the report you want to display from the list of options and the color you want your report to be presented in.

Color coding helps in quickly identifying the cards and placing them together as a group. Once you have selected the color, click on the Insert button.

You can add multiple “reports” cards as per your requirement. Repeat the steps mentioned above and choose a different report from the list and insert it. You can drag and drop the “reports” cards to change their placement as well.

KPIs

KPIs are quite similar to Reports, but these cards offer different data than the ones available in reports.

The KPIs are the ones which are required to tell if the store is doing good or not. They give an overall performance of the company regarding growth, sustainability, forecasts, and help in making future decisions.

Since we are making a sales/client WooCommerce dashboard, it is good to add the Key Performance Indicators which will help your clients to work up the performance of the WooCommerce store.

Some of the KPIs or Key Performance Indicators available with Metorik are average order net, avg. Order items, avg. Customer LTV, orders, items, etc.

You can select which KPI you wish to add to your dashboard, select the color just like we did to reports and click on the Insert button.

Segment Total(s)

Segmenting is one of the key features of Metorik. Segmenting gives you the power to create segments of data and later filter that data based on those segments. For cards, there are two segmenting options available, segment lists and segment totals.

Segment Total(s) gives you the totals and calculated data for your specified parameters. You can add custom segments as well, but we will look at this later on.

For adding a segment total, click on New card button like we usually do for adding a new card. From the type, select the Segment Totals option.

Now you need to choose what resource you wish to see the data of. You can display the data of orders, products, customers, subscriptions, carts, coupons, etc. Choose the one you want, and you will see a drop-down appear on the right by the heading “Segments.”

Select the option that matches your criterion and select the stat you want to display on your dashboard. The possibilities in the Segment and Display Stat dropdown will vary on the resource you have chosen.

Select the color for the card and click on the Insert button. You can also see the stat and how it will be displayed on the right side of the dialogue box.

You can add as many cards you want and display different segmented data on your dashboard.

Segment List

Segment list is another way to show data metrics based on filters and segments of your WooCommerce store data. The thing that makes this type different than segmented list is that instead of totals and counts, you see a list of data like customers or orders which is pulled from your store based on segment chosen.

For this, select the resource of which you want to see the data just like we did for the segmented orders. Now, go ahead and select the segment for that specific resource from the list.

Now select the order you want to display your data in and select the order (ascending or descending) by clicking on the arrow buttons. Give your segmented list a proper heading and choose the number of entries you want to display in your list.

Lastly, choose the color and click on the insert button.

Segmenting lists can be useful for displaying information regarding best selling products, highest buying customers or VIP customers, mostly used coupons, and similar data that will help the client to read from the WooCommerce Sales Dashboard.

Subscription Stats

As of now, the subscription stats display only two data: Monthly Recurring Revenue or MRR. This can easily be added to the dashboard by clicking on the type as “subscription stats” and clicking on the insert button.

Select the Subscription stats and click on the Insert button.

Heading

The heading type is not used to display any data or metric, but it helps bifurcate and group your cards. As the name says, headings card type add a text heading on the dashboard which you can use to drag and drop to place and group the relevant cards in one place.

You can choose to clip your heading in half as well by selecting the checkbox, and once you are done, you can add the heading by clicking on the Insert button.

All these options will give you the freedom to design your own custom WooCommerce client dashboard.

Creating Custom Segments

If you remember the part where we talked about adding segment lists and segment totals, you must have noticed there are numerous custom segments which you can use to create cards.

But, if you want access to a specific group of data that is not there in the list segments, you do not have to worry about it. Metorik allows users to create custom segments as well. You can create segments for orders, products, customers, coupons, etc. easily from the respective option.

We will understand this with the help of an example.

Let’s say you want to display the list of the orders made in the last 30 days where the order’s items are more than 5. Since default segments calculate the data of all the orders, you need to make a custom segment for that.

For this, go to Orders and click on “Segment orders by anything.” Now enter the parameters you need. For the current segment requirement, your segment will look something like this.

Just give your segment a proper name and click on the Save button.

Now you can use this segment to filter data on your Dashboard. Just select the resource as order, segment as the custom name you gave it and choose an arrangement order for the same. Give a heading, count, and card color and click on the Insert button. It should look something like this.

This was just for orders. You can segment data for products, customers, coupons, and even carts. Once you are done making changes to Custom WooCommerce sales dashboard, you can click on the Update button to make those changes live.

Winding It Up – Go and create a WooCommerce Dashboard for your clients!

With all the dashboard customizations available to you, you can create your custom WooCommerce dashboard for your clients. Once you are done making changes, you can invite your clients so they can have a look at the dashboard you have built and can make future projects and plans accordingly. To invite the client, refer this quick guide on How to Invite team members to Metorik.

Now go ahead and create impressive custom WooCommerce client dashboards with Metorik and take your web agency to the next level. There’s a lot more you can do with Metorik to improve the performance of your web store built with WooCommerce.

Go to Metorik

More of a visual orientated person? Check out this video below, Bryce Adams (founder of Metorik) gives a run through of the Dashboard function in Metorik:

Let me know what are your thoughts on Metorik as a custom dashboard tool by commenting your thoughts below and if you found this article useful, do share it!