It's no secret that Shopify's analytics are lacking some fundamental metrics that every store owner should be tracking.
LTV, CAC, profit by SKU, most frequently purchased together, product journeys, drop-off risks, customer segmentation — these are insights vital for every store owner to be tracking and optimizing around.
When looking for a Shopify analytics app, you don't need to spend big to get quality data. Most of the best apps run between $20-$100 per month.
If you're running paid advertising, you'll want to be sure the app or apps you choose can integrate (and integrate well) with your Facebook, Google, and other paid platforms so you can isolate your most profitable SKUs to advertise on.
It's also crucial that you can isolate your most frequent product journeys (e.g. if someone buys the Tee shirt, they're most likely to buy the Sneakers next) so you can direct your bundling and cross-selling effectively.
Knowing your lifetime customer value and the average time between orders is also critical. You'll also want to be able to segment those values based on where those customers were acquired. For example, customers from Facebook ads may have a different LTV than customers acquired through search. Knowing how much a customer is expected to spend will help you understand the overall profitabilty over that customers acquisition cost.
Last up, there are more user experience metrics that will help you optimize your site and identify potential issues. Some apps will help ensure your Google Analytics is properly connected so you can identify how many users you lose from the landing page, through the product page and checkout.