Your first hour and first week with Store Decode

In your first week with Store Decode, the numbers fill in as sessions add up. Your first visit shows on Activity within about a minute of switching the app embed on. The section map on Explore builds from the first homepage visits, updated every few minutes on a new live store. Percentages, signals and observations wait until your homepage has 300 sessions on a device, so you never read a share of a handful of visits.

How fast that happens depends on your traffic, not on a timer. A busy store can reach 300 homepage sessions on a device on its first day. A quieter store takes longer, and Home shows how far along it is. A session is one visit to your store, however many pages it opens; the glossary has every term.

The first minutes: Activity

As soon as the app embed is on, every visit is recorded. Activity lists the latest events as they arrive: page views, cart adds, checkouts, searches and orders, grouped by visit. A page view shows about 30 seconds after the page opens, or when the visitor leaves it.

On Home, the card reads Store Decode is setting up until the first page view arrives. Then it reads Store Decode is collecting, with the latest event and a Watch activity link. To see your own visit come in, press Start a check on Activity; Install Store Decode walks through it.

The first hours: the map builds

The page map draws your homepage section by section on Explore. It needs at least one homepage visit on a device before it can draw that device.

For a live store’s first 18 hours, Store Decode updates the map every 5 minutes until the first device can draw. Then it updates every 10 minutes until both Mobile and Desktop can. After that, and on a development store from the start, it updates every hour. While the map is still empty, Explore says when it builds next, for example “The map builds around 10:45 AM”, in your store’s time.

The first days: counts, then percentages

Until your homepage has 300 sessions on a device, Explore shows that device’s counts under a Collecting banner instead of percentages. Home says so in one line: “Percentages and observations start at 300 homepage sessions.” A bar under it counts your sessions towards that.

Each section is also judged on its own sessions: the sessions that had it on the page. Under 300 of those, its Views shows as a count and it carries no signal. A signal is a plain-words label such as Working well or Dead clicks, never a prediction.

Observations come from a run each night, after your store’s day closes. Each rule waits for its own minimum. For example, a dead-clicks card needs 30 dead clicks on one element, and a card about product cards seen but rarely clicked needs the cards on screen 500 times. Home’s Collecting, by page type card lists each rule still waiting, with how many it has and how many it needs.

Home also shows a ladder of milestones. Unlike the percentages, which need 300 homepage sessions on each device, the ladder counts sessions over the last 14 days on all devices together. Each step keeps the name Home gives it:

Sessions	Step on Home	What it brings
100	Facts about your pages	Sales after a click by section, what mobile visitors see, and which grid positions get seen.
300	First observations	The first observation cards, such as scroll and before and after, each with one option.
500	Collections and banners	Products seen but rarely clicked, and how each banner compares.
1,000	Sections seen by few or clicked by few	Sections clicked often but seen by few, and sections seen but rarely clicked.
3,000	High-confidence insights	Observations marked high confidence after a statistical check.

After the first week: comparisons with your own store

Store Decode compares your store only with its own earlier days. The Store pulse card on Home compares the days you choose with the same number of days before. It shows a change only when both periods hold at least 50 sessions. Until then it says there is no earlier period to compare yet, or too few sessions to compare.

So the first week-over-week change appears after two weeks of at least 50 sessions each. Home names that step Week-over-week changes.

When you change a section and press Mark as done on its observation, Store Decode reports on the change twice, 7 and 14 days later, on all devices together. Each report goes by the first number that shows a clear difference, from sales after a click down to the page’s add-to-cart rate. It is a date split of your own data, never a test. Before and after a change lists the four numbers and says when a change gets no report.

Common questions

Does it show data from before I installed?

No. Store Decode measures from the moment its app embed is on, and imports no history. The first numbers you see are from your first visits after setup.

Why is the map still empty after a few hours?

The map needs a homepage visit on that device first. If Activity shows no visits at all, the app embed may be off; Store Decode not working? goes through each cause.

Why do I see counts and not percentages?

Your homepage has fewer than 300 sessions in the window you picked. A percentage of a few dozen visits moves a lot from one day to the next, so Store Decode waits. How Store Decode measures explains each minimum.

See a sample week of numbers on the home page