Hello everyone. I have posted the same question last week, but I think it was deleted. If this is not the right place to post, let me know.
Is it possible to track app installs coming from Shopify ads? We have a UTM tag to track the app installs in our backend, but it records everything coming from the Shopify App Store.
We want to be able to make the distinction between organic installs and paid installs, but I can’t seem to find any option (or solution on the forum).
Hey @gabrielh - thanks for getting in touch! We may have moved your post to a another subforum. This is something we sometimes will do if we feel the thread fits better in another discussion forum. That said, I may have an answer for you. I did a bit of digging into our dev docs and found this page here on tracking app listing traffic. You would have to set up analytics first per the instructions on that page, so I can’t say for sure how this would work with your app’s current workflow.
Under the URL Parameters section, I found a parameter called surface_type that has a variety of different values. It looks like you can use two different values that may help you differentiate between where the merchant interaction with your listing originated. These values are search, which relates to the organic search result on the Shopify App Store and search_ad, which would represent that they clicked through your paid ad.
These parameters are passed by Shopify as part of the URLs sent through to either Google Analytics or Facebook (whichever you choose to use for tracking, both offer analytics APIs). Then, the params could be parsed through a logic you set up in your app, if you decided to go that way, or just viewed through the analytics dashboards available through Google/Meta.
Hope this helps - let us know if we can clarify anything for you!
Thanks for the reply, @ShopifyDevSup !
We did look into this and its close to the solution we are looking for. We have on the Shopify platform the analytics you are talking about. However we can not differentiate the traffic that we send via the install link on your platform.
All traffic(paid/organic) has the same source and medium. If we would somehow be able to attach the variables you are describing (surface_type) to the outgoing CTA(install link) we could also track where users are coming from via paid or organic and how they behave on our website afterwards.
The fact that we can’t split this traffic in these two groups makes it a “black box” for us and also less interesting for us as a company to invest more on ads in your platform because we can’t calculate the returns.
Cheers,
Gabriel
Hey @gabrielh ,
Always happy to share, and many thanks for this great feedback. Though we can’t make any guarantees on how all feedback is handled, we can absolutely advocate for the use case you shared. I will make some notes and pass it on to the relevant teams for future consideration - Cheers!