Why are my Adwords and Shopify analytics not matching?

[LoveisaRug]

My Shopify analytics no longer matches my Adwords analytics with Clicks to Visits. This just started to happen yesterday?

[Iris]

Hi @LoveisaRug ,

Thanks for reaching out! I’d love to help with your question.

Gathering data about who visits your website and how often is crucial to understanding how your marketing campaigns are performing. 

When it comes to Google data and Shopify's own analytics reporting, there are some known discrepancies. This is because all analytics services use different tracking mechanisms, so your visitors aren't recorded equally. We actually have a help doc on these analytics discrepancies you can find here. While there are many possible reasons for differences in tracking results, some of them include the following:

• Differences in how page reloads and unique visitors are counted. Google counts every page reload, but a browser doesn't count reloads of cached pages.
• Google can only count visitors with JavaScript and cookies enabled. Some visitors might not allow cookies or JavaScript.
• Customers can use browser extensions to block Google Analytics from tracking their sessions and purchases.

It's also a great idea to make sure you have set up Google Analytics properly and that you don't have any duplicate Google Analytics tracking tags. For example, you may have one added in Online Store > Preferences > Additional Scripts, and one inserted manually into your theme's theme.liquid file. We recommend only having the tracking tag added in the Additional Scripts section. If you also have other code added in this field, then removing any other code would be a good idea, leaving only the Google Analytics tracking code.

While I recommend ensuring that your tracking is set up correctly in Shopify, it's also important to keep in mind that discrepancies are completely normal and to be expected. As a rule of thumb, I always suggest referring to the Shopify Analytics reports, which will give you the most accurate data. 

Are you running any marketing campaigns right now? Your marketing campaigns are one of the most important things to track in Google Analytics. Google Analytics allows you to create quickly and automatically track campaigns but simply using a special URL.  All you have to do to track campaigns automatically is use Google’s Campaign URL Builder tool to create a trackable URL. This will help you determine which campaigns are performing better than others so you can focus your marketing efforts accordingly.

Let me know if you have any further questions!

[hespa]

we all know about tracking discrepancies between services that are not the issue, Shopify analytics stopped showing sessions on day 16.03 I went from 200-300 a day constantly when I am running ads to 5, the next day 6 .... today 1 so far with ads running same as before...  users are definitely on the page as much as before why doesn't shopify see them anymore ...... , live view was on spot tested many times with friends locally and abroad. now it does nothing I see a lot of 000  and flat lines on my analytics page, sales register normal even on the map but not live, add to cart, and checking out - nothing in the analytics but I see my abandoned checkouts ..... it is definitely something off there,  no excuses. there are more threads, more people having this issue these days.

[hespa]

https://community.shopify.com/c/technical-q-a/help-visitors-not-tracked-by-shopify-system/td-p/11333...

[alban789]

same problem here !

[hespa]

curious that there are people here having the same issue popping up on the same day! hope its not going to take weeks to fix this......

https://community.shopify.com/c/technical-q-a/help-visitors-not-tracked-by-shopify-system/td-p/11333...

[Yaroslav11]

Hey Iris! This is definitely a problem on your end (probably server-side). As you can see, many people face the same issue, and it started in the same timeframe. It's not related to google analytics or ads setup - the discrepancy is very huge, and we don't know whether it impacts sales or not. 

There's also a previous problem that wasn't fixed (in case it's already fixed, there was no communication about it from your side whatsoever) - hundreds and thousands of automatically generated URLs with a /wpm@ slug were automatically added to the Google index even though those URLs are blocked in robots.txt 

There are multiple threads about it, and both of those issues, if not resolved quickly, might affect people's businesses in a very bad way.

[hespa]

Yaroslav 11 thx for the translation! you definitely got the knowledge and the language skills 🙂 it's exactly what I was trying to say for days now.... more people should push for a resolution, shopify is very quiet about it so far. 

[LoveisaRug]

Hi Iris, Ive been through this with your support team with no solution. As you can see many others are having the same problem and for me, it appears to be a UK issue. I've done all of the checks and absolutely no numbers are being reported on Shopify analytics for the UK.

For someone who relies upon the data and your platform for sales, this is not acceptable. Please fix asap!

Clive

[hespa]

 

Hi Iris this is just normal discrepancies right? Never mind that this never happened before… just normal use GA …. 👍🏼

[coxy2024]

Same for me in 2 stores , low visitor numbers but still getting sales but GA shows 4 x as many clicks to the websites. Something is obviously not working Shopify's End.

[coxy2024]

Looks like it's finally sorted, numbers are working correctly. Someone worked the weekend at Shopify.

[hespa · Accepted solution]

 Yes it does look like it’s coming back up! Nice! 

you see! Iris/Shopify was it that hard to admit that there was a problem on your side in the first place?!!!