When I have 100 sessions and 5 sales. I should have a 5% conversion rate. Shopify however does not think so and tells me it’s 0.7%
When I have 5 orders and I look in analytics it tells me I had two completed checkouts.
I am not an expert on this but I would expect 5 completed checkouts. (and yes all orders were completed and paid in my shopify store)
contacted support about it a couple of times because i think that failing to register conversions will also cause conversions not to be reported to ad platforms. They don’t do anything with it.
I’ve also encountered this issue and realized that if a user has opted out of data collection or cookie tracking, this can affect metric tracking such as sessions or sessions converted. While it is important to ensure accurate information to make important business decisions, ensuring that a customer’s privacy is respected as well as following any laws or regulations, such as GDPR, is just as important. This is the landscape moving forward for digital marketers.
You can always use the total orders rather than sessions converted for your conversion rate, but be mindful that your sessions may not be accurate as well.
Looking at multiple analytical platforms such as Google Analytics or any ad platforms you are using can possibly fill in any gaps found in Shopify Analytics.
Ad platforms like meta have realized that a cookie-less future is coming so setting up Facebook’s Conversion API is very important. Another suggestion is leaning into gathering first-party data like building your email list.
If you already talked to Shopify, they likely sent you this article already but in case not, you can see more info here about discrepancies with your analytics.
Thanks for the follow up. Analytics is pretty useless now.
One would typically want to compare some stats over time, as in months or even years.
I would think that shopify, operating at server level, is much better equiped to produce correct data. GA with it’s tag/script clearly has a disadvantage with regards to tracking compared to the owner of the backend. (GA indeed only records half of the conversions nowadays).
At the server level you know exactly to which client you are responding and what they do in de shop. With proper anonymization privacy would be respected. It seems to me that shopify can only operate correctly when it can set a cookie at the clients browser. Well that ill be a thing of the past soon anyway so unless they fix analytics the might as well remove it all together.
I understand how frustrating it can be when analytics and conversion tracking don’t align with your expectations. A significant factor contributing to these discrepancies is compliance with GDPR and other privacy regulations. These rules impose restrictions on tracking customer behavior unless explicit consent is obtained.
Our app is fully integrated with Shopify’s Customer Privacy settings and ensures your store is set up to collect the maximum amount of data allowed under GDPR while remaining compliant. We guide you through proper consent management, ensuring your analytics and conversion tracking are as accurate as possible within the legal framework.
With our help, you can optimize tracking without compromising on privacy or compliance. Feel free to check out our app and let us know if you have any questions—we’re here to help!
hi there, we have started to have the same issue, even with orders made by US and AU. So, GDPR is not the answer in our case. Are you still encountering the issue? thanks in advance
yes it sucks big time. i am under the impression that meta only tracks one in 3 sales that it brings in. so it is not optimizing at all. I tried a third party tracking tool but that changed almost nothing.
The GDPR explanation covers why session data gets incomplete, but Shopify already has the order confirmed on their end - the gap between your actual orders and what analytics shows is an attribution problem, not a missing data problem.
So if you can’t trust that number, what are you actually basing your store decisions on right now?
