
No matter what type of business you run, data reports are always essential to track your website performance. There are lots of analytical tools for that, like
. Yet, Magento store owners are lucky enough to have the extensive built-in Magento 2 reports.They cover key areas such as marketing, sales, products, reviews, and others. All neatly sorted into multiple grids. However, surprisingly, not everyone is taking advantage of this feature.
That's why in this guide, we'll cover all types of Magento reports, their management, and other advanced tools for tracking website activity.
But let's start with the basics.
What are Magento 2 Reports?
Magento 2 reports are sets of organized and subject-specific data about your store's performance and activities. They are available out of the box in each Magento edition and provide crucial insights into the effectiveness of your store operations.
Magento analytics allows you to monitor your marketing campaigns, review the sales statistics, and keep track of all key processes in your store.
Thus, you shouldn't miss your chance to take the most out of this feature.
Types of Magento Reports
All Magento 2 reports are located under the Reports tab in your admin panel. There are five main types of reports: marketing, sales, reviews, customers, and products. The Adobe Commerce users also benefit from the Business intelligence reports.
Each of them presents data from a corresponding branch and is subdivided into smaller reports. We'll review all of them for a better understanding.
Marketing report
The marketing reports feature valuable data about your promotion campaigns. Here, you can find the Products in Cart, Search Terms, Abandoned Carts, and Newsletter Problems reports.
Correspondingly, they show you what products and how often people add to the cart. Besides, you'll find insights into the abandoned carts that didn't end up as a purchase.
Besides, you can review the Search Terms report to see what keywords people use and how effective your search results are. This info allows you to optimize your product pages and make them more informative.
The Newsletter Problems report will show you if there are any issues to attend to. Monitor this one closely if you have any actively running campaigns and fix any issues before they do too much harm.
Sales report
The sales report is one of the most important reports for any store. Thus, this Magento 2 report gathers the key data related to purchases, taxes, refunds, and more.
The Orders reports present a number of orders for a specified period, sales items, sales total, refunded amount, collected tax, and shipping costs. What is more, you can filter the records by date, order status, and period to get an accurate report.
Similarly, you get detailed reports for Tax, Invoiced amounts, Shipping, and Refunds. Then the Coupons report shows all coupon codes used during a specified period, as well as the discount amount and price rule associated with it.
That's quite a lot of reports already but that's still not it. You also get all transactions and their details in the Paypal and Braintree Settlement reports to understand how these payment methods are performing.
Reviews report
Magento reports go even further and offers you the Reviews report. You analyze the reviews by customers who submitted them or by products they posted them for.
Thus, you get an extensive list of popular products, average ratings, and number of reviews for each item. This is a great opportunity to detect the product people love the most and improve your catalog based on customers' suggestions.
Customers report
The Customers report is no less useful. It allows you to review how many orders customers placed and the amount they spent in your store. This data is especially useful when you build loyalty programs or analyze your pricing and purchasing tendencies.
Besides, there is a separate report for New customers, so you can keep track of new people joining your community.
Products report
For more effective inventory management in Magento, it's important to know how your products perform. Magento has you covered and provides multiple Products reports for your convenience.
Here, you review the best-selling products for a specified period, see how many of them have been ordered, and review their prices. There are also all Ordered products so it's easier for you to evaluate the purchasing tendencies.
The Views report features the items people open in your store, while the Downloads one shows the statistics of your Magento downloadable products. On top of that, there's a Low Stock report which allows you to restock on time and provide high-quality service.
Business Intelligence
The reports we've covered so far are available for all Magento 2 users. Yet, there's one more section only Adobe Commerce users can benefit from — Business Intelligence.
It provides several report dashboards on orders, customers, and products. The visual component of these reports is remarkable and helps to comprehend the data better.

(Source — Adobe Experience League)
Thanks to business intelligence data, you can keep track of unique customers, AOV, tax/shipping by region, products added to wishlists, and more.
But only if you need such elaborate data directly in Magento. Since most of that is covered by Google Analytics 4 with a few settings. We'll dig more into this later in this guide.
Magento Reports and Analytics: Management
The reports in Magento come with offers a wide range of important information. So, you should also know how to generate the reports and receive the most accurate data.
To show Magento 2 reports, you need to take a few steps.
1. Refresh data
First, it's important to refresh the data to get accurate results. That said, navigate to Reports > Statistics > Refresh Statistics and choose the reports you'd like to update.
Define what timeframe you'd like to refresh the stats for and hit the Submit button.
Now, you are good to move forward.
2. Set up report filters
Having refreshed the data, you need to choose what report you'd like to generate. Let's take the Orders report as an example.
Choose the Scope to define what website, store or store view to generate the report for. Proceed with filling out the filter fields and specifying the Date, Period, From/To, Order Status, Empty Rows, and Actual Value display.
These fields may vary depending on the report you choose. In any case, you need to fill out the filter at hand to get the correct data.
3. Generate/export report
Once you are ready with the filters, just press the Show Report button to generate the report. It will feature the info as per the conditions defined in the filter.
You can also export the report in a CSV or XML file. This is a great solution if you want to save the report or continue working with it using external tools.
See? It's not that hard to generate reports in Magento. Use the same steps to review the rest of the reports in Magento and process it accordingly.
Track Performance in Google Analytics
Magento 2 reports provide an extensive source of information for better store management and performance optimization. Yet, this is not the only option you can opt for.
Another solution is to add Google Analytics to Magento 2 and use this top-notch tool for even more efficient reports.
It's a great way to get more insights into your customers' behavior, their shopping journey, and possible bottlenecks they face.

(Reports snapshot in Google Analytics 4)
Google Analytics is a sound choice for those who want more visual reports. Magento analytics is accurate and informative, yet it may be quite complex to work with.
Besides, GA offers more opportunities for customer segmentation and allows you to track key eCommerce events.

(eCommerce events in the Google Analytics report)
What's interesting, this solution allows you to integrate the server-side tracking in Magento to ensure seamless data tracking. That's a huge step towards more accurate reports.
The choice is yours! You can use either the default Magento 2 reports or third-party tracking tools. In any case, these reports are crucial for strategic and effective development of your store.