I am having an issue since a week now with the Shopify visitor counter : All the visitors are suddenly not counted anymore on the dashboard (neither on live).
We have been from 800 visitors/day to sudenly less than 20 visitors/day on the Shopify dashboard.
We firstly focused on our traffic source and marketing side, however after a lot of tests and with a 3rd party vistor counter, the result is that there is a bug on the Shopify visitor counter which doesn’t count anymore !!
Please does someone has already encountered this ?
About 4pm yesterday my traffic plummeted unexpectedly. I had 600 sessions on Sunday for example, and 289 yesterday, 283 acheived before 4pm.
I woke this morning, would usually expect 50-80 sessions- just 2.
Google Analytics is showing the same- just 2 sessions.
My Google Ads account and FB Ads account are showing about 40 clicks between them - there is no issue acessing my site via these ads.
After having a play about, it seems Shopify and GA are only registering Direct traffic or traffic once the session ‘adds to cart’. I know the traffic is coming in as I’m on 25% conversion today vs a usual 2% and my sales have not dropped.
I’ve spoken to Shopify help who say there isn’t an issue- but it’s reall frustrating!
Yes they replied the same thing to me !
They told me that there is no problem on their end. However, I installed an app which counts the number of visitors (Lit Live View) and the data is completely different ! The app is still tracking with no problem the number of sessions, add to cart and also it records on the sessions of the user.
So now, it is 100% true to say that the Shopify dashboard can only counts the number of sessions with an “add to cart” but not the other ones.
Actually it is more than fustrating, because this is a MAJOR issue because all these sessions collected by Shopify can’t be tracked by our Facebook/Google Pixel and this leads to a lack of performances.
If you use Facebook marketing, I invite you to go check your events manager.
Since 2 days we see a 90% traffic drop. Shopify doesn’t show sessions before the /cart page. It puts all sales under ‘direct’ and it says there are 0 sessions from social source, while we are running FB ads with 1k spend a day. There is definitely a big problem going on. Our CR yesterday was 20% vs 3% normally.
We tried to explain the problem to the support chat, but they start talking about how they can help increasing traffic lol. Like i’m stupid.. I definitely know when there is something going on. And luckily I found out that I’m not the only one with the same problem!!
Actually sometimes when the theme is switched to another, the code suddenly change for some reason and it leads to a lack of tracking events such as visitors.
Here is the solution from Shopify :
“As a note, please let the developer know that the content_for_header part of the theme code had been modified. More specifically, “our monorail and trekkie events on page loads.” As this is something we do not support editing, you would need to reach out to your developer and have them roll back the changes that were made. Alternatively, you would need to use an unedited theme.”
Yes we also added that line of code. Its solved now. But we still have the question why the code is suddenly deleted 2 days ago. While our file is not been edited the last days. But hopefully it won’t happen again.
I also tried to track the users by the system but faced the same result that you mentioned in the post details but you can see here a new tool for tracking now I am using this feature
Our team got this sorted out with Shopify last week. We had just published a sizable theme update and it sounds like any “large amount of coding” can possibly mess with the {{ content_for_header }} attribute, whether it edits it or not. Fortunately our sessions came back to normal after a few days, and we had installed the Lit Live View free app to tracks sessions to confirm any changes in trend.
We’re not sure what exactly caused it to fix itself (as we hadn’t made many changes ourselves after the fact), if it really did just take time, or if Shopify did something behind the scenes without saying anything. The problem seemed to be “fixed” after I installed the mentioned app - right after I finished talking to support.
Shopify did tell me that this is a currently known bug that they’re working with. If you’re struggling with this (and have a third party developer), I’d recommend reaching out to your theme developer about a possible “bug” in the {{ content_for_header }} code. Ask them to check that “trekkie.storefront” is operating normally, as Shopify is reporting it as a possible bug. If you have to reach out to Shopify, link them to this thread as well, that seemed to help us.
