Shopify analytics is an out-of-the-box solution, and a basic one at that.

Unfortunately, Shopify tracking of ecommerce data (transactions, add-to-carts, etc.) is incomplete and unreliable.

Thankfully, we offer an automated solution for Shopify that stitches together the missing pieces of your data collection.

If you use Shopify Plus or run a store with a large marketing budget, you especially know how important accurate data is to your sales and marketing efforts.

Here are 6 known pitfalls for the current Shopify analytics feature:

1. Cross-domain and subdomain tracking issues

Currently, the Shopify checkout is sending the customers to a Shopify domain (checkout.shopify.com). This causes the visitor sessions to end suddenly — even if they are in the process of buying an item.

The sales attribution for Shopify mercha is also painful due to the change of domains causing ‘checkout.shopify.com’ or a payment gateway to be attributed as the ‘last click’.

At the moment, Google Analytics can help you track both micro and macro moments in a customer journey. Example of micro-moments are:

1. Clicking on a product link
2. Viewing product details
3. Impressions and clicks of internal promotions
4. Adding / removing a product from a shopping cart
5. Purchases and refunds

All of these ecommerce interactions help you as a marketer / acquisition manager / ecommerce director / founder to know more about your customer’s interactions with your products.

The benefits of tracking with Enhanced Ecommerce go beyond the above interactions. Enhanced Ecommerce can also be used to optimise product listings.

2. Clicking on a product link

Clicking on a product link will show you the most appealing products, so you can improve the click through rate on the category page.

If the click through rate is bad, check your product’s master picture and see if there are any errors in getting to the product page.

Also, you can investigate if these products are in the right category list. See how can you make these products more appealing to your audience by improving your click through rate.

3. Viewing product details

Viewing product details will simply show you the most viewed product details. You can see this using the URL, but having this info in a structured way (the product name and product SKU) will make the sales and marketing analysis far easier.

4. Impressions and clicks on internal promotions

Nearly every Shopify store uses banners, but how many are accurately tracking their effectiveness?

Knowing how they perform can mean better UX design, a better usage of storefront space and even savings on design assets.

5. Adds to cart and removes from cart

Before the holidays (and Black Friday Cyber Monday weekend), you probably consider which of your products should be offered with discounts and which ones deserve a bigger slice of the marketing budget.

Knowing the products that are added to cart and removed from cart most often will help you narrow down your product lineup. By checking your product pictures and descriptions, you can identify any errors in the checkout flow before your customers do.

Make sure you give your customers access to any information about delivery and refunds as well. Compare your products to those of your competitors to see if your pricing and delivery costs are to the customer’s advantage. At the end of the day, it’s about making your products more appealing to shoppers.

With our new v8 script, we moved these types of events (add to cart and remove from cart) to server-side. In other words, tracking your events with be 100% accurate, regardless of the device being used.

Since the add-to-cart and removed-from-cart events are now sent server-side, the smaller v8 script will also help your site speed. Smaller script = faster load time!

6. Purchases and refunds

Purchases

Littledata’s solution offers server-side integration to provide a 100% match between your Shopify store and Google Analytics. This ensures that you register the sales data, even if the customer never gets to see the thank you page on your store.

Refunds

We all know online sales tracking isn’t the end of the process. Returns are a reality in ecommerce, and the percentage of customer returns can be higher or lower depending on a number of factors. This is an area Shopify analytics has not fully addressed. Luckily, there’s a better solution to stitch together every data point and ensure 100% accurate tracking!

Get started with the best Shopify tracking available with Littledata’s 14-day free trial.

If you use Shopify Plus or you need custom setup and reporting (and support from a Google Analytics consultant), we’ve got you covered with our enterprise plan options. Take a look!