In the modern ecommerce landscape, data is power. Making sure that your data is as accurate as possible, though, can give you the ultimate leg up on your competitors.
As a Shopify store owner, ecommerce, or marketing manager using both Shopify analytics and Google Analytics, you’re surely aware of the numerous benefits of using Shopify as your ecommerce platform and GA as your analytics platform.
However, you’re also probably aware of the fact that these two platforms don’t really play well together, and that Shopify’s native connection with GA has quite a few shortcomings.
This disconnect is what inspired us to create Littledata. We built a tool that resolves data dilemmas, restores your trust in the data from GA, and offers accurate ecommerce and marketing insights — no questions asked.
Even better, many of the most critical fixes and enhancements that come with Littledata’s tracking are available right out of the box.
In this post, we’ll show you five such fixes and detail how they will improve in your Shopify store’s analytics.
5 benefits you’ll get from Littledata right after install
1. Accurate attribution metrics
When checking referrals to your store, you might have noticed a lot of your traffic coming with “direct/(none)” listed as the source/medium. Oftentimes, this number is a lot higher than expected (over 30%), and paid traffic channels are underrepresented.
That means you have a marketing attribution problem.
As soon as Littledata starts tracking sessions and events on your Shopify store, accuracy for these metrics instantly improves. That’s because the app uses a combination of two different kinds of tracking to capture full customer behaviour data:
- Client-side tracking, or customer data gathered from web browsers and mobile devices
- Server-side tracking, or customer data gathered from web pages that fulfil clients’ requests on browsers/mobile devices
Tracking both together ensures data coverage across clients’ sessions without interruption. Plus, UTM parameters alongside the GA ClientID are always passed into Google Analytics, giving you an accurate source for each visit along with previous interactions visitors may have had with your store.
If you’re spending significantly on social ads and marketing campaigns, this data fix will have an immediate positive effect for calculating your return on ad spend (ROAS) and overall return on investment (ROI). Even if you’re just starting out and need to learn more about attribution to find your most valuable leads, accurate attribution stats will pay dividends for your store.
2. Revenue, transactions, and refunds
One of the more well-known shortcomings of GA for Shopify stores is that it does not capture all transactions happening in Shopify, and Shopify doesn’t send refund data to GA. This creates a big revenue discrepancy between platforms and leaves you unable to trust GA’s accuracy for data about your store.
To bridge this gap, Littledata relies on Shopify’s webhooks to create all transactional events server-side, making this particular problem a thing of the past.
What will change in GA specifically, you ask? All purchases will show up in your GA reports with the correct order and revenue details, refunds will be tracked, and most importantly revenue in GA will match with Shopify.
3. Checkout funnel
One of the biggest features of GA’s Enhanced Ecommerce is support for checkout steps. GA uses a funnel navigation path to follow your website users from the time they initiate the checkout up to the final purchase.
Shopify does not track these interactions natively in GA, so it’s hard to tell where customers drop-off before buying — or even include them in a retargeting campaign.
Thanks to Littledata’s server-side tracking using Shopify’s checkout webhooks, you can see those interactions and understand your customers’ behaviour in the checkout.
After you install Littledata on your Shopify store, you’ll see GA’s Checkout Behaviour report now displays the correct number of users who navigated through the funnel, at each step, with the corresponding drop-offs.
4. Order affiliation
There are times when seeing an ecommerce transaction event alone in Google Analytics isn’t enough. That’s especially true when you’re trying to measure the performance of third-party apps you use to manage subscriptions, upsells, product exchanges, and affiliate marketing.
In these cases, you need to get more granular when analyzing a transaction using a metric like order type.
Littledata shows this additional transaction data by collecting Shopify’s order tags, then making use of GA’s Affiliate Code report and Ecommerce Affiliation dimension.
This is especially useful when you’re trying to count new subscribers and manage subscription analytics, measure LTV, identify product upsells, and track affiliate referrals.
5. Product List performance
Many stores typically use GA’s ecommerce reporting to measure checkout performance or product revenue. However, with Littledata installed on your Shopify store, there are many more insights to be unlocked around product list performance than those basic metrics.
By analyzing events at the top of the funnel, Littledata lets you identify which products need better images, descriptions, or pricing to improve conversions.
Space on product listing pages is a valuable commodity, and products that get users to click on them – but don’t then result in conversion – need to be removed or amended. Equally, products that never get clicked within the list may need tweaking.
Littledata tracks product list impressions on any Shopify storefront, using Google’s standard product list event properties.
How to get Littledata set up for your Shopify store
Littledata’s platform makes a significant positive impact on your metrics reporting right from the first time you use it.
Having correct attribution, a clear picture of revenue sources from different order types, and full view of checkout funnels and product performance can make a major difference in your ROI right away.
Perhaps best of all, you can see the benefits Littledata can bring to your store for 30 days without paying a cent. Plus, when you sign up for the Littledata 30 day free trial, you’ll also get custom benchmarks to target based on leaders in your industry.
Sign up for Littledata to fix your analytics reporting in a snap and set your store up for the most successful year yet.
