If you’ve noticed a new referral source ‘shop_app’ appearing in your Google Analytics, this is from Shopify native mobile app, Shop.
What is Shop?
SHOP by Shopify is a consumer mobile app, aggregating products and experiences from many Shopify merchants. It is heavily integrated with ShopPay, and also handles order tracking for items bought in the Shopify checkout
How would the Shop app fit into the user journey?
There are two scenarios:
- User finds your brand on Shop
- User adds to cart and completes checkout
- Order appears on your store, via the ‘Shop app’ sales channel
shop_app
into the transaction affiliation in Google Analytics, so the affiliation is Shopify, Shop App
.- User discovers product on Shop app
- User wants to find more about your brand and clicks to open
- User (maybe) interacts with your online store
How to get Shop app traffic under Referrals
Shop app is genuinely a source of customers, and Shopify sets the UTM source tag.
Unfortunately, Shopify only sets utm_source=shop_app
in the URL query parameters in scenario 2, and Google Analytics won’t consider this a referral unless utm_medium
is also set. So it appears under the (not set) or Online Shopping channel.
Littledata’s tracking script automatically sends utm_medium
as referral if only the source is specified, but you can also edit the default channel grouping in GA so that shop_app
is grouped as a referral.
Conclusion
So if you’re a Littledata customer: our app has got you covered.
And if not there’s a few changes you’ll need to make in Google Analytics settings to make sure shop_app traffic is treated correctly.