Google Ads say they have sent more people to my website than my store says I had visits.

[DagNabItAll]

Hi, I've started running some google ads and have run into something strange.  Yesterday Google claims it sent 2300 people to a landing page of ours, however Shopify says our total store sessions was only 1900.  We also got visitors from Facebook, and some other visitors.  So somehow these google clicks are either getting lost on the way, or Shopify Online store sessions are calculated in a non-intuitive way.

This store has always had weird tracking.  Through UTM codes we can see that our Facebook ads generate sales, but Shopify claims that only 1/3rd of Facebooks traffic is from Facebook, and that the rest is direct (I'm quite sure that the Facebook people are coming, when the site first started we only had Facebook as a traffic source and the total traffic lined up well, despite it being miss-tagged). Whereas we have a bunch of other stores where the Facebook traffic is correctly labelled in the dashboard at a much higher accuracy.

Thanks for any help!

[socially-kevin]

There is a core frustration with attribution.  Especially if you are sending both Google and FB paid traffic.  Shopify is also its own beast when it comes to being part of the attribution game.

Just a reminder that visitors and sessions are two different things.

Have a read

https://www.shopify.ca/blog/analyzing-shopify-reports

kevin

[DagNabItAll]

Hi, I'm not sure I grasp your point.

Our store doesn't report a single visitor attributed to paid Google ads, and significantly under reports our Facebook traffic (it recognizes a third of our Facebook traffic as coming from Facebook, on our other sites it's around 80%+).  

That's not our problem though.  So far today Google says it has sent 2100 people to our landing page, and Facebook will have sent a few hundred, and we will have had a few hundred other visitors too.  However our total visitors today according to Shopify is 1,068, and our total sessions are 1,159. It's not a matter of reporting, or at least that is a far secondary concern.  The issue is that probably around half of our paid clicks from Google aren't registered as arriving at our site at all.

[socially-kevin]

I saw a mix of sessions and visits and wanted to make sure you aren't mixing the two.  But obviously not.  I wouldn't go by realtime stats as they aren't instantaneous.  What about 7 days ago?  Do those numbers jive up better?

I wouldn't look at same day data, especially from multiple sites.  Try comparing the Google stats from the FB Pixel data and see how the traffic numbers compare.  I love Shopify, but I don't hold a lot of faith in their stats reporting.   It's not a platform strength imo.

[DagNabItAll]

Okay good idea, I went and looked at the 1st to the 7th.  During that period google claims to have sent 5687 people, and Facebook 4110.  Shopify says we received 7657 Visitors and 8522 sessions.  So our paid traffic equates to 9797 clicks, but we received 7657 Visitors, on top of that we also will have gotten around ~1000 visits from other sources.  As I have more faith in Facebook traffic arriving than Google it looks like ~3000 of that 5687 did not arrive at the website, or behaved in a fashion that would lead Shopify to not consider them a visitor.