Reporting – Custom Dashboards with Magento Data

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20 MAR 2024

Better Understand Sales and User Data with Targeted Reports

What is the revenue per day, week, or month? How many new customers are there? Which product categories are particularly in demand at certain times? With the help of reports, online retailers can get to the bottom of these questions. Magento or Adobe Commerce offers a built-in reporting solution. However, it is not flexible enough for many use cases. DELABYTE has therefore developed interfaces to external reporting tools such as Cyfe and Looker Studio (Google Data Studio).

Overview of Magento Reporting

What is the benefit of Magento Reporting?

Magento reporting refers to the automated evaluation and clear presentation of data from Magento. Reports and dashboards present data in an organized manner and make patterns in the data transparent through visualizations. They help shop operators make better business decisions.

What reporting options are available for Magento?

Magento and Adobe Commerce come with their own reporting solution. However, it is highly limited in terms of the reports that can be generated and the presentation of the data. Alternatively, data from Magento can be transferred to external reporting systems – such as the dashboard solution Cyfe or Looker Studio (Google Data Studio).

Which reporting solution does DELABYTE recommend?

An externally connected reporting system allows generating custom reports based on data from Magento. We currently recommend connecting Looker Studio (Google Data Studio). It is easy to use and offers the greatest flexibility in data analysis and visualization.

Magento Reporting: Internal vs. External Tools

Reports are indispensable in online retail. Many webshop operators start their day by reading a report – typically automatically generated as a PDF and delivered by email. Reports show them how the business is performing and form an important basis for decisions. Magento or Adobe Commerce comes with its own reporting solution. At first glance, it offers a comprehensive repertoire of evaluations. The categories range from marketing reports, review reports, sales reports, and system insights, to customer reports, product reports, and business intelligence.

However, internal reporting has three major disadvantages:

  • The reports are predefined. The system is inflexible and hardly customizable.
  • The presentation of the reports is outdated. The internal tool cannot graphically prepare the data.
  • Magento reporting operates on the same database as the shop. It puts additional load on the system.

An alternative is connecting external reporting solutions. We have successfully integrated two reporting systems with Magento and used them in production: Cyfe and Looker Studio (Google Data Studio).

“External reporting solutions offer much more possibilities than Magento's built-in reporting system. We are particularly impressed with Looker Studio – a very powerful tool with interactive dashboards.”

Cyfe and Magento: Solid Solution for Fixed Report Formats

To evaluate and visualize data from Magento more flexibly, we initially developed an interface to Cyfe – a software-as-a-service solution specializing in building custom dashboards. External sources can be defined in Cyfe. We integrate the Magento data through this channel. Reports are then defined in Cyfe. The system is quite flexible. We have predefined about 30 different reports. However, defining the reports is time-consuming. You need to plan in advance how the reports should look. They are fixed.

Looker Studio (Google Data Studio) and Magento: Powerful and Flexible Data Analysis

We have also implemented an integration for Looker Studio (Google Data Studio). The integration essentially consists of data synchronization. We bring the data from the Magento database into BigQuery – a cloud data warehouse from Google that processes large amounts of data very efficiently. The data stored in BigQuery (which is stored in the EU) can then be specified as a source in Looker Studio (Google Data Studio). And the system can be used immediately.

Defining reports in Data Studio is much easier than in Cyfe. The system contains many interactive elements that allow flexible data exploration. For example, standard filters can be set for display periods. It is possible to delve deeper into specific data such as product categories. Additionally, Magento data in Data Studio can be easily combined with data from Google Analytics and Google Ads. This allows webshop operators to see exactly when campaigns ran and how they impacted the business.