Littledata’s Shopify app is updating to use Google’s latest tracking code library. This will simplify your setup for Google Ads and speed up your site.
Google’s ‘global site tag’ or gtag has been live for a year now and is stable for Littledata to adopt. In version 5 of our tracking script we now use gtag for all the events sent to Google Analytics.
The advantages of gtag are:
- Integrates with Google Ads out of the box – no need for separate Google Ads conversion tracker
- Smaller Javascript library = faster page load times
- Future proof for using Google Optimize
In addition, we are now using the standard ‘data layer‘ format used by Google Tag Manager. This will make it easier for all you hackers to extend Littledata’s tracking and use GTM with the enhanced ecommerce data layer, and easily create tags for marketing platforms like: Facebook, Criteo, etc.
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We’ve also moved to using the default ecommerce event naming recommended by Google. For example, the event category ‘Ecommerce’ is now ‘ecommerce’ (lower case) and event action ‘Add to cart’ is now ‘add_to_cart’ (snake case). If you have goals or reports based on the old event names you may need to update them.
One final change is that we’re only sending page views to GA when the page is not hidden in the browser. Certain advertising campaigns, including SnapChat ads, preload your webpages to provide a faster experience for users, but this skews your analytics with lots of low-grade visits who didn’t actually ‘see’ your landing page.
How to update the script
If your store already has our tracking script installed, just click on the in-app notification to update.
Not a Littledata user yet? If you’re struggling with implementing Google Ads conversion tracking or GTM for a Shopify store, check out our Google Analytics connections for Shopify and Shopify Plus stores. Let our app fix your tracking, so you can get back to business!