The Ecomm Analyst

Every e-commerce tool sells you a dashboard. Shopify has one, Klaviyo has one, Meta and Google each have their own, and your 3PL probably has one too. The problem is that none of them answer the questions I actually care about on a Monday morning, and most are built to make the platform look good rather than to help me make a decision.

A “custom dashboard” is only useful if I can shape it around my own questions. That’s the filter I use. Can I slice the data the way my brand operates, or am I stuck with whatever views the vendor decided to ship?

Here’s the working list of the tools I think are worth the time, in rough order of how often I open them.

1. ThoughtMetric

ThoughtMetric is what I use for attribution and cross-channel reporting, and the custom reports feature is the reason I keep recommending it to other operators.

Most attribution tools give you a handful of preset views and call it a day. You get channel performance, creative performance, maybe a journey visualization. If the question you want to answer doesn’t map cleanly to one of those views, you’re stuck exporting CSVs and rebuilding in a spreadsheet.

Custom reports in ThoughtMetric let you pick the metrics and dimensions you actually care about and build the view yourself. A recent example from my own workflow. I wanted to see how traffic from ChatGPT and other AI assistants compared to traditional organic search, segmented by product category. In most tools this would be a half-day project involving UTMs, GA exports, and a Google Sheet stitched together by hand. In ThoughtMetric it was a few minutes of clicking. Referrer source on one axis, product category on another, revenue and conversion rate as the metrics. Save it, share the link, done.

What matters is that the report is tied back to actual revenue, not sessions or clicks. That’s the hard part of custom reporting for e-commerce, and it’s what most spreadsheet-based dashboards get wrong. You end up with pretty charts that don’t connect to the P&L.

The other practical win is that saved reports are shareable. When an agency partner or a freelancer asks what our AI traffic is doing, I can send them a live link instead of a screenshot that goes stale the next day.

2. Triple Whale

Triple Whale is the dashboard most Shopify operators have already heard of, and for good reason. The MER and new-customer-ROAS views are genuinely useful if you’re running paid media across multiple platforms. Setup is fast, the mobile app is fine, and creative reporting is solid.

My honest take. Triple Whale does a lot of things well but feels heavy. If your brand is at the scale where you need a creative co-pilot, a pixel layer, and a full suite of benchmarks, it earns its keep. If you’re a smaller team that mainly wants to know which ads are profitable and what your blended ROAS is, you’re paying for a lot of surface area you won’t use.

3. Lifetimely

Lifetimely (now part of AMP) is the tool I reach for when the question is about profit and LTV rather than acquisition. The automated P&L pulls in ad spend, shipping costs, and COGS, which makes it much easier to sanity-check whether a given campaign is actually making money after all the costs that don’t show up in Meta’s reporting.

The cohort views and LTV projections are also useful if you’re trying to figure out how much you can afford to pay for a new customer. That’s a different question from “what was ROAS last week,” and it needs a different dashboard.

4. Polar Analytics

Polar sits in a similar space to Triple Whale with a stronger emphasis on no-code custom metrics. If you’ve ever wanted to build something like “subscribers whose second order was within 30 days” without writing SQL, Polar is one of the cleaner ways to do it. It’s more flexible than Triple Whale on the reporting side and slightly less opinionated on the attribution side.

5. Looker Studio

Free, flexible, and painful. Looker Studio will do almost anything you want if you’re willing to wire up the connectors and spend time getting the data layer right. For stores that already have a BI person or an agency partner who lives in it, it can be a great home for bespoke reporting. For everyone else, it becomes one of those dashboards that gets built once, looks great in the kickoff meeting, and never gets opened again.

I still use it for one-off exploratory views, but it’s not my main reporting home.

6. Peel Insights

Peel is worth knowing about if your whole business is retention and repeat purchase. The cohort reports are some of the best I’ve seen for subscription and replenishment brands. It doesn’t try to be a cross-channel attribution tool, which I actually respect. It does one thing and does it well.

What I’d actually set up

If I was spinning up a new Shopify brand tomorrow and had to pick two dashboards, it would be ThoughtMetric for attribution and custom cross-channel reporting, and Lifetimely for profit and LTV. That covers the two questions I’m trying to answer most weeks. Where did the revenue actually come from, and are we making money on it.

Everything else in this list is worth considering once you have those two answered. Not before.