As experts in web analytics for ecommerce sites, we often tinker with our data collection ‘engine’ to get the best results. In the latest iteration of our tracking code, we’re proud to announce some major improvements.

Littledata’s V8 Shopify Tracking Code comes with exciting improvements in three major areas: data accuracy, page speed, and versatility.

These new changes will affect both our Google Analytics and Segment tracking code for Shopify sites, plus any stores using our data layer to trigger events in Google Tag Manager (GTM). Here’s a quick rundown of the update:

Improvements for accuracy

We improved the way we track key events so that:

• Product list views are sent only as users scroll down the page and view a product for more than 300 milliseconds (the minimum time it takes the human brain to process an image)
• Product list views and clicks have more accurate position information to help optimize product sort order
• Search pages are also tracked as product lists
• Social shares and clicks on product images on product detail pages are tracked

These new improvements follow other recent improvements  we’ve added, which include:

• Using the latest gtag and GTM libraries
• Tracking page views only when the page was actually viewed

Improvements for page speed

Our research on performance has shown that faster page load speed is linked with better ecommerce conversion rates. With this in mind, we’re reducing the time it takes to load the tracking script.

Here’s how we’re doing it:

• A much smaller data layer for product list pages, especially for stores with lots of product data
• Minified tracking code, hosted on a content delivery network (CDN)
• Moved to server-side tracking of add-to-carts, resulting in a smaller script in the browser
• Removed dependency on jQuery

As an example, let’s imagine a product listing page has 30 products. Previously, the total Javascript data layer size would have been ~100Kb, but after the update would be less than 20Kb — up to 5x zippier!

Improvements for versatility

Tracking adds-to-cart is surprisingly hard.

While this is partly due to add-to-cart buttons being targeted by many other scripts, the main culprit is something else — many online stores have a mini-cart or a separate checkout button. This means users may never actually see a ‘cart’ page at all.

Our new V8 Tracking Code bypasses this issue by tracking cart updates from Shopify’s servers without generating any extra or cost for your web servers.

This means that whenever an online shopper adds or removes your product from their cart — whether by clicking on desktop or swiping on mobile — that action will be tracked with 100% accuracy.

How do I get this update?

[Update] V8 is now out of private beta — this means all Shopify stores installing the Littledata app use the new tracking code.

This updated script, as well as all future improvements, is included with your ongoing Littledata subscription. Just sit back, relax, and enjoy automatically accurate data about your Shopify store performance.

What if I need to keep the previous script version?

That’s fine too. Just reach out to our support team before 6th September and we can make sure you don’t get the V8 script.