so i have recently spent £70 on tik tok ads however on my shopify dashboard it says it has cost £0, has zero impressions and zero clicks, however when i open tik tok ads manager it says its spent £16 and has had 2000 clicks leading to sessions on my store. But when i check analytics back in shopify I have only had 10 sessions. has anyone had a similar experience ? please help as this £70 for a broke student trying to start a business is quite a lot. Thank you in advance
Different platforms use different analytics tracking logic. I know this because I built a custom analytics pixel and noticed that my stats were different than Google Analytics and Shopify Analytics. I looked into how they track visitors, sessions, etc, and it’s open to choices (for example how long a person visits a 2nd time before you count them as a new session, there were some others, where I agreed with the tracking on some and disagreed on others).
Also for attribution you could run into stuff with how that’s counted. For example, say someone comes to your store from TikTok, then leaves, then clicks on some other link coming to your store. You could give attribution to either TikTok, since it was the first one, or the other site, since it was the one that actually made the conversion. Different people have different opinions, and different biases. For example if you’re paying an advertising platform, they are incentivized to count any actions coming from that ad to be the defining conversion.
To answer your question exactly, I recommend trying to find how they both calculate analytics. I remember reading some documentation on Shopify before saying something like “why is shopify analytics different than google analytics”… you could start there, then find how TikTok attribution works, then you should have a full understanding, and then decide which of the analytics you think makes more sense for your model and base your campaign decisions based on that.