Chat analytics overview
Everything on Analytics → Dashboard is computed live from your store's actual conversation data — there's no separate analytics pipeline running behind it, and no delay while a batch job catches up. This page walks through where the numbers come from and what each one means.
Where the data comes from
Every chat conversation is stored as a thread — one browsing session's worth of chat — made up of individual messages. The dashboard reads straight from these:
| Metric | How it's calculated |
|---|---|
| Unique users | Distinct visitors, based on Shopify's own first-party identity cookies |
| Sessions | Distinct browsing sessions, a 30-minute rolling window tied to Shopify's session cookie |
| Interactions | Sessions that included at least one customer message |
| User messages | Total messages sent by customers |
| Chat orders / revenue | Orders where a webhook matched the purchasing customer back to a prior chat session |
Visitor and session identity both come from Shopify's own first-party cookies — a logged-in customer's ID first, then the _shopify_y/_shopify_s cookies. A visitor who hasn't consented to tracking isn't counted at all, which keeps these numbers directly comparable to Shopify's own analytics rather than inflated by an alternate tracking method.
The funnel cards
Same underlying data, read as ratios:
- Chat View Rate — sessions where the widget was opened, over total sessions
- Session Interactions — sessions with a real exchange, over total sessions
- User Interactions — unique visitors who engaged, over all unique visitors
- Chat Conversion — chat sessions that ended in a purchase, over all chat sessions
- Session to Order — total orders over total sessions
- Chat Share of Orders — chat-attributed orders over all store orders
- Sessions per User — how many sessions the average visitor racks up
- Avg. Interactions / Session — average messages exchanged per session
Shopify sessions vs. ShopGuide sessions
There's a toggle for how "sessions" get counted:
- Shopify (the default) pulls from Shopify's own bot-filtered analytics through the Admin API — the same number Shopify shows you elsewhere, but it needs the
read_reportsscope and Shopify's Protected Customer Data approval. Without those, session-based ratios shown/ainstead of a number that would be misleading. - ShopGuide counts from the app's own thread data instead. Always available, though it counts sessions a bit differently than Shopify's bot-filtered figure does.
Chat Conversion and Chat Share of Orders don't move when you flip this toggle — they don't use total sessions as a denominator in the first place.
Breakdowns and date range
Beyond the funnel cards, the dashboard also shows a device breakdown (mobile vs. desktop), an input-method breakdown (button clicks vs. typed text vs. voice), and a date-range picker so any of this can be viewed for a specific window instead of the default one.
What's genuinely not here
No sentiment scoring, no churn prediction, no usage heat maps on this page. NPS is real but separate: if you turn it on in Settings → AI Behavior, a short two-question survey goes out ten days after a chat-assisted order, and responses land on their own dedicated NPS page — it's off by default and doesn't show up on the main analytics dashboard. For individual conversations and where customers actually hit dead ends, see Conversation insights.