How To Create a CRO Report: Small Business CRO Guide

A conversion rate optimization (CRO) report is a structured document that synthesizes quantitative and qualitative data to evaluate how effectively an ecommerce store converts visitors into customers. Rather than just listing surface-level performance analytics, a CRO report analyzes the specific friction points within the conversion funnel to determine why users drop off before completing a purchase.

The stakes for mastering these reports are high. Research from Littledata shows that while the average conversion rate for Shopify stores is around 1.4%, stores in the top 10% achieve rates of 4.7% or higher. As Jamil Bhuya, cofounder of Otherhalf Studio, says in an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast, the mathematical leverage of these improvements is huge: “Average conversion rates are 1%. So even by cranking it up to 2%, that’s doubling the revenue.” Directly addressing the leaks in your customer journey through a CRO report is an effective way to extract more revenue from the traffic you already have without increasing your ad spend.

In this article, you will learn how to create a comprehensive CRO report using Google Analytics and Shopify’s native behavior reports. Understand the essential metrics to track, the CRO tools required to gather behavioral data, and the process for turning granular data into a prioritized list of actionable insights.

What is a CRO report?

A CRO report is a specialized document that summarizes key metrics, user behavior, and experiment results specifically related to your store’s conversion performance. While a standard analytics dashboard tells you what happened on your site yesterday, a CRO report investigates why those events occurred. It acts as a diagnostic tool that looks past surface-level data to find the root causes of visitor hesitation or cart abandonment.

The report’s primary role is to identify specific opportunities to improve the customer journey. For most companies, the report is the bridge between raw CRO analytics and tangible success. It empowers your team to define which issues—whether it’s a confusing form or a slow mobile experience—should be a priority based on their potential impact on the bottom line.

Charlie Bowes-Lyon, cofounder of the sustainable deodorant brand Wild, says that many merchants focus too much on the top of the funnel while ignoring the goldmine at the bottom. In an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast, he says that “if you spend $10,000 on ads and you convert 1% of the people on your site and you can increase that to 2%, you literally double your sales without any extra costs.” This doubling of efficiency is the ultimate goal of the CRO report.

How to create a CRO report

1. Define your goals and key metrics
2. Collect quantitative data
3. Analyze performance and user behavior
4. Incorporate qualitative insights
5. Use testing platforms for validation
6. Remove friction and provide recommendations

Building a report that leads to a meaningful fix requires a strategic approach. It’s not only about listing conversions; you’ll also want to create a narrative from your data insights:

1. Define your goals and key metrics

Define what success looks like when you put your CRO report into action. You want to see a sales boost, but what experiences can you improve so that more customer journeys end in sales? 

Track both macro-conversions (sales) and the micro-conversions that lead to sales (email sign-ups, add to carts, or search queries), to get the full scope of metrics that matter to your business. That includes conversion rates for the highest-traffic pages, bounce rates, and average order value (AOV). Every metric you pull should help answer a specific question about visitor behavior, so that when you track these metrics over a week or a month, you’ll start to see trends. 

Shopify stores automatically track specific ecommerce events, or actions that customers take, that you can connect to Google Analytics via the Google & YouTube app:

• Page view

• Search

• View item

• Add to cart 

• Begin checkout

• Add payment information

• Purchase events

2. Collect quantitative data 

To ensure your findings are statistically significant, rely on robust data sources. Google Analytics and Shopify’s native tools are the industry standards for gathering conversion insights. 

While you may eventually pull this data into a single document or Looker Studio (formerly known as Google Data Studio) dashboard to create a definitive report, you’ll start by gathering data from Shopify’s native analytics and Google Analytics.

Shopify offers several built-in features that should be the cornerstone of your CRO analysis. You can find these by navigating to Analytics > Reports in your Shopify admin.

• Behavior reports and conversion rate breakdown. This tracks the specific path a visitor takes through your store and checkout. Seeing exactly where users drop off—whether at the cart or the shipping page—tells you where the website needs immediate improvement.

• Conversion rate over time report. This report allows you to monitor your optimization efforts month-over-month to see if changes actually lead to more conversions. 

• Analytics dashboard. You can make use of this customizable space for sessions, sales by channel, and traffic volume.

• Bot filtering. Shopify’s ability to filter out bot traffic ensures your metrics reflect real human interactions, which typically convert at higher rates.

• Marketing reports. Use these to identify which traffic source or market segment is your most profitable. As Jamil of Otherhalf Studio says, all those dollars in SEO, email, and social media “eventually all come back to shop in the same place: your website.”

Once you have a handle on your Shopify analytics, you can combine those insights with Google Analytics to identify the why behind the what. By connecting your store via the Google app, Shopify automatically sends these events to Google Analytics. In GA, navigate to Reports > Monetization > E-commerce purchases to see which products are driving the most interest versus actual sales.

In your final CRO report, you combine these tools by using Shopify as the source of truth for revenue and Google Analytics to analyze the specific behavior—like scroll depth or button clicks—that led to those sales.

3. Analyze performance and user behavior

Raw numbers are the foundation of your report, but the analysis is where the value lies. Use custom reports to look at device reports. If your mobile conversion rates are significantly lower than desktop, you have a clear mandate for improvement.

Nik Sharma of the brand marketing firm Sharma Brands says on an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast that this stage is about ensuring your landing experience matches the user’s intent. He says that if someone clicks an ad for itchy feet and lands on a generic cosmetics page, they will bounce. Landing pages ensure “everything on the page sort of ladders back up to that north star point” of the specific problem the customer is trying to solve. Your report must identify if you are creating these bounces by failing to provide a cohesive customer journey.

4. Incorporate qualitative insights

To truly understand the customer journey, you must look into the “how” by incorporating qualitative insights. This involves using CRO tools like heat maps and session recordings to see where visitors are clicking or scrolling.

A heat map tool like Hotjar provides a visual example of user struggle. It shows you the “why” by providing insight into user behavior. You don’t need to include every session in your report. Instead, look for patterns. For example, if your Shopify reports show a high drop-off on the Shipping page, go to Hotjar and watch 10 to 20 recordings of users on that specific page. In your final CRO report, include a screenshot of a heat map showing where users are clicking (or failing to click) and a bulleted summary of user friction points observed in recordings.

At the outdoor power equipment company FactoryPure, founder Eugene Ravitsky focused on answering customer questions before they were even asked. “We do a lot more of conversion optimization than we do on SEO. We listen to the questions that our customers have, and we try to make that very evident on the website, specifically on the product pages," he says in an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast.

5. Use testing platforms for validation

While CRO is an ongoing process, the professional CRO report serves as the official record of your experimentation. It doesn’t just offer suggestions; it validates solutions through rigorous testing. Before committing resources to a full redesign, use platforms like Optimizely or VWO. 

Charlie from Wild recommends “sweating the small things” and running tests 24/7. He notes that optimization “could be as simple as changing your call to action (CTA), your button on the homepage from ‘Buy Now’ to ‘Learn More’ and testing those two against each other.”

However, founder Stephanie Chen of the cookware brand Anyday says that testing must be practical. “If we wanted to A/B test everything [the practice of serving different pages of a web page, ad, or email to different audiences to see what is more effective], it would just take a long time,” she says in an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast. If you’re short on time, prioritize tests that address the biggest friction points identified in your granular data.

6. Remove friction and provide recommendations

Translate your findings into a language your team can act on, focusing heavily on removing friction at the bottom of the funnel. Identify opportunities for further testing at shipping, checkout, and payment hurdles.

After seeing high abandoned checkouts, Claudia Snoh of the coffee brand Kloo discovered that the high shipping fees were a likely cause. By eliminating the fee and adjusting her unit economics so that the price of the product included shipping costs, she saw a “much, much higher conversion rate,” she says in an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast.

Conclude your report by recommending these types of friction-reducing experiments to ensure you are optimizing for new and returning customers.