Google Analytics and Shopify Analytics showing very different active user data

Shopify Discussion
1

We know Google Analytics (GA) and Shopify analytics are not going to match perfectly (reading this: https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/reports-and-analytics/discrepancies), but we are finding that the GA active user count is always signficantly lower than Shopify’s “Visitor’s Right Now” metric. Typically GA will report half the number of active users compared to Shopify. It seems highly unlikely that half our users have javascript or cookies disabled (GA will not count people active without these), so we trying to determine other possible root causes. The only working hypothesis we have currently is that Shopify is not actually counting active users at a specific moment in time, but rather cumulatively over a period of time such as last 20 seconds or last 60 seconds.

Questions for the community:

  1. Are other store owners seeing a similar, significant difference in GA vs Shopify active users?

  2. Does anyone know why there would be such a discrepancy?

Mark

exact second and perhaps cumulating over a period of time; for example the users in the last 3 minutes, etc? Please let me know.

2

Hi,

A significant portion of Internet users today have an Ad Blocker installed on their browser and depending upon how the Ad Blocker is configured, it can prevent Google Analytics from loading. According to c|net, 40% of users in the US had an ad blocker installed this time last year and other countries may be even higher.

If you think that might be the issue, you can look for aserver-side tagging solution. Google offers this feature with their Google Tag Manager, but it can require a lot of work to set up. There is a Shopify app, GTM Datalayer by Elevar, which appears to remove the complexity in return for a monthly fee.

Hope that helps,

Chris