Analytics dashboards

Use Analytics dashboards to track storefront performance over time. A dashboard is a saved layout of metric cards, charts, and tables that all report against a single date range and comparison. Use this surface when you want a stable, repeatable view of how search, merchandising, and discovery are performing — and a quick path into the report behind any number you see.

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Prerequisites

• Your store must be connected to Layers and past onboarding. See Install if you have just installed Layers.
• Forward storefront events to the Beacon API so dashboards have data to report.
• A few days of activity should exist so period-over-period comparisons have a baseline to compare against.

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Select a dashboard

Use the dashboard selector at the top of the page to switch between your saved dashboards. Each store starts with a default dashboard of pre-configured cards, and you can save additional dashboards for different views — for example, one for search and one for recommendation blocks. The selected dashboard determines which cards, charts, and tables you see. Everything on it reports against the same date range and comparison, set in the controls described below.

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Date range and comparison

A row of controls at the top of every dashboard sets the window all cards report against:

• Date range — pick a relative window such as Past 7 days, a calendar window such as This month, or a custom range.
• Compare to — pick the baseline every metric is compared against. This defaults to the previous period, so period-over-period comparison is on by default, matching Shopify Analytics. You can switch it to another baseline, such as the previous year, or turn comparison off.

Because comparison is on by default, metric deltas are labeled over prior period, and any chart that plots a comparison shows a comparison swatch in its legend so you can tell the current period apart from the baseline at a glance.

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Visualization types

Dashboards support several visualization types, and every one includes a legend:

• Metric card — a single-value card showing the current value, a sparkline, and the change over prior period.
• Line chart — a trend over time, with a series legend and a comparison swatch when comparison is on.
• Bar chart — values across categories, with a legend identifying each series.
• Donut chart — a share-of-total breakdown, with a legend mapping each slice to its label.
• Table — rows of values you can scan and drill into, with a header row labeling each column.

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Open the report behind any card

Clicking any visualization opens the underlying report in the report editor, so you can go from a number on the dashboard straight to the query that produced it:

• A saved metric opens its saved report.
• An ad-hoc card opens a new report seeded with that card’s query, so you can edit and refine it without changing the dashboard.

Table rows are the exception: clicking a row drills down in place without navigating away, so you can keep exploring a table without leaving the dashboard. See Drill-down performance panels below. To learn how reports are built and edited, see Reports and the LayersQL syntax behind every query.

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Drill-down performance panels

Many cards let you open a performance panel for a specific subject — a product, collection, block, or search term — to see how it is performing on its own. When you open a drill-down panel from a card, it now inherits the dashboard’s current date range and comparison instead of resetting to a default window. The panel opens already scoped to the same period and baseline you were looking at, so the numbers line up with the card you came from. You can still change the date range or comparison inside the panel to investigate a different window.

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Multi-metric search reports

Search-term reports and tables can show several metrics per query term in a single table — for example, searches, clicks, and conversions side by side for each term — instead of one metric per table. This lets you compare how a term performs across the full funnel in one view. These multi-metric search tables also support period-over-period comparison, so each metric can show its change over prior period alongside its current value. For pre-built search and block reports you can drop in, see Metric recipes.

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Troubleshooting

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Next steps

• Reports — build, save, and export the reports behind your dashboard cards.
• Metric recipes — pre-built reports you can drop onto a dashboard.
• LayersQL syntax — the query language behind every card and report.
• Insights — the AI feed of trends, anomalies, and opportunities.