Conversion tracking problem on new website

Technical Q&A

Topic summary

Main issue: On a new Shopify store using the new checkout (Checkout Extensibility), over 50–80% of orders are attributed as “Direct” in Shopify’s Sales attributed to marketing and GA4, despite running only Google Shopping. Tracking via Symprosis (customer events script) and via GTM shows identical results. Other stores from the OP see only ~20–30% loss, not >50%.

What was tried/suggested:

  • Alternative pixel implementations (custom/manual) showed no improvement; one user still saw ~80% Direct.
  • Possible GDPR/consent banner impact referenced via a related forum thread; consent can suppress/refuse marketing cookies leading to Direct attributions.
  • Check UTM parameters (Urchin Tracking Module tags) capture and Shopify’s reliance on UTMs versus what Google/Facebook send; misconfig or stripping could cause Direct.
  • Consider conflicts with other apps (e.g., attribution/fraud tools like Triple Whale) and theme effects.

Context/implications: Campaigns are optimized on conversion value (target ROAS), so misattribution affects performance.

Status: No confirmed fix. Action items include auditing consent management, UTM tagging and persistence across the new checkout, app/theme conflicts, and validating manual pixel installs. Multiple users report the same issue, suggesting a broader compatibility/consent issue with the new checkout. Links to a forum thread and a YouTube setup guide were provided.

Summarized with AI on December 16. AI used: gpt-5.
1

Hello to everyone :slightly_smiling_face:

I’m posting this message because I’m having tracking problems on my new shopify site.

More than 50% of the conversions are attributed to direct traffic (in the shopify report “Sales attributed to marketing”, this is the result). Knowing that for the launch of this site, I’m currently only using google ads => shopping. So 3/4 of sales should be attributed to this channel, and not to direct traffic. These stats are identical on my GA4.

For tracking, since this site uses the new shopify checkout (and not the historical checkout.liquid), I use the Symprosis application, with a custom script added to the “customer events” part. To see if the problem didn’t come from this script, I also added a new script via GTM method. The tracking results are identical between these two methods, and a very large proportion of sales are still attributed to direct sales.

I have 4 other sites, where I’ve never encountered this type of problem (admittedly, there is some loss in tracking, 20 or 30%, which doesn’t show up in google. But no more than 50%, as is the case with this new site).

My questions:

  • Do you have any idea where the problem might be coming from?
  • For those who use the new shopify checkout, do you also have this kind of tracking problems ? I don’t know if there is an impact, but I’m questionning…

I’m starting to run out of ideas to solve this problem, and I might as well say that it needs to be solved because all my campaigns are based on conversion value (ROAS Target).

Best regards

2

When I used my own script for pixels, and compared against the additional scripts, I could not find any difference in the majority of accounts. Only a few random accounts I would get a few more or a few less.

But I would say 95% where all identical. For those that did not match, the difference was very small and not a cause for concern.

That is my opinion.

3

Hello,

I know that GDPR settings can mess it up pretty badly the tracking setup.

Please take a look at this thread: https://community.shopify.com/topic/1216093 , I think your issue is similar or the same as this.

Best,

Peter [email removed] Datma

Product analytics and reporting

Demo: https://demo.datma.io

4

hi,

we have exact!!! the same issue, we also used the symprosis app.

Did you solved it? and if yes, how you did solved it?

It would really helped us.

best regards

Phil

5

You can always try to install it manually to test if it works, I have a free code available:

6

sorry, that doesent work, still 80% are “direct”.

7

I believe shopify reports rely on UTM tags. Maybe there is some misconfiguration on what Shopify detects vs what Google sends out.

Try checking in the area of UTM’s

8

yes but we didnt changed anything and we talk about 5 different shops with the exact same problem and its not only google ads, its also facebook ads and so on…

9

@Philipp19841 did you get this sorted?

Same issue for us

Also do you have any other software running (triplewhale, fraud software, etc?).

Also what theme are you using?