We’re often told by partners to expect Shopify to show more sessions than our ad platforms. Some days it does. Most of the time, however, Shopify is showing as much as 80% less traffic than our Google paid click data or Meta landing page data individually, let alone combined. Due to this magnitude of discrepancy, the directionality of sales CVR most days seems to be inaccurate (due to wrong denominator). How can we investigate, how can this be better synched? Critically we don’t know where to focus spend and improvements if the data is misleading.
Hello Amanda, thank you for the question, my name is Emmanuel from FeedArmy and your host for todays AMA.
I have to say, welcome to the new age of tracking, and it’s not a fun one. So there are many reasons why there are issues with Google’s tracking.
For example you might remember 2 or 3 years ago, that consumers can opt out of tracking, and that apple phones also disable tracking. To combat this discrepancy, Google designed an AI tool, this tool is not accurate, it’s just a guess based on math. Google uses your enhanced conversion data, which is the name, email, and address of the consumer, then tries to match this with their math to check if this was a conversion or not, when the consumer disabled tracking.
However, what I found was that this had roughly a 5 to 10 conversion inaccuracy, so either Google tracked too many or too little.
So that is one reason why the discrepancy. Then you have differences in how each platform attributes a conversion. Meta measures things differently from Shopify, from Google Ads, hack even until last year, Google Ads vs Google Analytics was different. So it’s pretty much 1 big mess.
My recommendation, and honestly I don’t do this for my clients as it’s too expensive for what it’s worth, is to use server side tracking.
For me personally, while I would love to be more accurate, it’s not that necessary to get a good working account. But for big companies where every little detail counts, this is of course, not good enough. So you need to use more accurate tools.
Then you want to also have more accurate tracking across the board, so in this case you need to look at tools such as https://www.northbeam.io/
I hope this info is going to help you.
Try Infinite Google Ads Tracking for Google Conversion for your shopify store. and must try Google server side tracking.