I’m facing a major tracking issue on my store. The majority of sales are being labeled as “direct” in Shopify, even though there are no direct traffic sources. This is significantly affecting our ability to track campaigns accurately on Meta, Google Ads, and Google Analytics.
Here are some details:
The issue has been ongoing for around 6 months, but we noticed it more after updating our theme last month.
We use UTM parameters in most campaigns, but they are not being tracked properly on Shopify. Sales driven through ads are still showing as direct orders.
Meta Pixel is connected via Shopify’s Meta app, so the setup should be standard and error-free.
We have already verified pixel integration and reviewed tracking setups across platforms.
Has anyone else faced a similar issue? Any advice or steps that worked for you would be greatly appreciated. I’ve already contacted Shopify support, and they’re investigating the issue with their technical team.
Can you check if the theme that you have selected causing this problem? You mentioned that you updated your theme last month. That may create some issues. I suggest checking every step for that.
Secondly, I am assuming the UTM parameters are set correctly but still has issues. In that case, I hope you are using the correct UTM parameters (utm_source, utm_content, utm_campaign, etc). Sometimes, and some cases only, the UTM is not able to track a conversion when a customer clicks your ad link from a different source. So if you don’t want “direct” sales being tracked, you might have to check the source.
Hope this helps
Ensure that your ad location has the right utm_source.
I discovered that we were using a custom checkout (GoKwik) which was causing this issue. Anyways shopify on itself isn’t reliable for tracking the sources. So we match the Data from the ads dashboard, GA4 and Shopify to get an avg estimate.
