Have plans this Thursday? Join me, Tamas Hanko, in a new webinar about why Shopify data doesn't always match Google Analytics -- and how to fix this. In this free webinar on Thursday, November 19th, hosted by our partners at Prisync, we will dive deep into the waters of Shopify and Google Analytics, and look at how to make this data play well together to power your ecommerce sales and marketing. There are lots of reasons why Shopify and GA might have a mismatch, and we'll run through the common ones plus a few outliers. Every site is unique, but there are common setup and tracking issues, especially with Shopify's checkout. In this free presentation, you will learn: Common issues with making Shopify data match Google Analytics dataUnderstanding the differences in how metrics are calculated in Analytics and ShopifyWhat server-side tracking can (and can't) do to help fix these issues Reserve your free spot today Can't make the live webinar? Sign up anyway and we'll send you a recording after the session. You can also check out Littledata's free ebook on Shopify and Google Analytics.

We've a built a loyal following for our Shopify to Segment connection, and this month we've rolled out the next version, v2, with new events and enhanced functionality. As Shopify and Segment both continue to see unprecedented growth, Littledata is here to ensure accurate data at every ecommerce touchpoint. We've seen a surge in DTC and CPG brands on Shopify Plus that rely on Segment to coordinate customer data across marketing, product, and analytics tools. We have continued to develop our Segment integration to fit all of these use cases. [note]If you installed Littledata's Segment connection previously, please contact us to add the v2 events.[/note] About Segment v1 Last year, we worked with Segment to create a robust Shopify source for Segment users. The aim was to make everyone's job easier, from CTOs to ecommerce managers. Littledata's Segment connection v1: Captures all customer touchpoints on your store, both pre and post checkout Sends data to any of Segment’s hundreds of destinations Works seamlessly with Google Analytics Uses a combination of client-side and server-side tracking to capture browsing activity, orders and refunds Sends user fields for calculating customer lifetime value [subscribe] What's new in Segment v2 Since we launched the first Shopify app for Segment in May 2019, we have continued to make improvements based on user feedback and new use cases. The latest version of our Shopify source for Segment offers several updates and enhancements, including support for email marketing around order fulfilment events; tracking for a range of new order and payment events, including POS orders and order cancellations; and alias calls to support additional analytics destinations such as Mixpanel and Kissmetrics. Fulfilment status Many of our customers use Segment events to trigger transactional emails on platforms like Klaviyo and Iterable. One key email that stores want to customize is the 'Your order has shipped' fulfilment email, and so we now trigger a Fulfilment Update event when the fulfilment status of an order changes. This event includes status, tracking_numbers and tracking_urls (where the shipping integration allows), so the transactional email can include actionable details for the end user. These events can also be used in analytics destinations to look at fulfilment trends by product, or see how marketing campaigns around shipping match real-world delivery times. Support for email marketing Email marketing destinations such as Klaviyo, Iterable, and Hubspot, cannot use an anonymous identifier -- so our Segment connection now sends an email property with all events (when it is known), usually from checkout step 2 onwards. Where the email is captured on landing pages (e.g. popup forms) we also send this with the Product Viewed and Product Added events, to make it easier for you to run retargeting and engagement campaigns. Support for Kissmetrics & Mixpanel destinations To support seamless customer tracking in analytics destinations such as Mixpanel, Vero and Kissmetrics, Segment requires an extra alias call. Littledata ensures the pre-checkout anonymousId is added as an alias of the userId (used from checkout step 2 onwards). Learn more in our developer docs. Customer account creation On Shopify, every checkout (even as a guest) creates a customer record. This was already passed on to Segment with an Identify call and a Customer Created event. However, it is useful to know when this customer creates a password and creates a verified account with the store. For example, some brands use this event to trigger welcome emails or offer discounts. With Segment v2, we now send a Customer Enabled event when the user has confirmed their email address and created a Shopify customer account, with verified_email set as true. Payment of draft orders Some stores (especially B2B brands and wholesalers) create draft orders which are later paid. From November 2020, Littledata's Segment connection triggers an Order Completed event whenever these draft orders are paid, linking them back to the user session when they were created. POS orders Previously POS (point-of-sale) orders were excluded from Order Completed, as this polluted the revenue attribution in Google Analytics or other Segment destinations. However, as Shopify POS and other POS orders have become more popular, we now send a separate POS Order Placed event, so you can track the POS orders and choose whether to add them to your web orders. Payment failure After a customer goes through your checkout and completes an order, there is still a chance the payment fails, usually due to fraud checks. A new Payment Failure event allows you to track these failures, and see if they are more associated with particular marketing campaigns, geographies, products, or other factors. Order cancellations If the admin has cancelled an order, perhaps due to the product being unavailable, an Order Cancelled event is now triggered (including the cancel_reason). This is useful for both tracking/analysis and re-engagement campaigns. Product properties Last, but certainly not least, we've expanded the range of product properties sent with every product for better segmentation. Details such as shopify_variant_id, category and brand are sent with all client-side events and most server-side events. For more information, read our developer docs or schedule a demo today with an analytics expert.

It seems like everyone's considering going headless lately. What do you need to know before you make the leap? This year, in addition to optimizing Littledata for Shopify Plus (including headless Shopify setups), we have extended our headless tracking to include ReCharge and Segment in addition to Google Analytics. And we have collaborated with Nacelle as our preferred tech partner for headless builds. Led by CEO Brian Anderson, Nacelle has raised around $4.8M in funding so far, including angel investment from Shopify and Klaviyo execs. A growing number of successful online brands seeking to go headless are using Nacelle for the build and Netlify for deployment, and it's been great to see remarkable performance improvements with shared customers like Ballsy, who saw a 28% conversion rate increase across the board after moving to a headless Nacelle setup with Littledata for analytics. So we were excited to contribute some ideas to the new Nacelle ebook on how to get the headless experience without overhauling your Shopify Plus tech stack. If you are using Shopify Plus (or planning a migration), we highly recommend downloading the free guide and sharing with your team internally -- as well as any external partners like ecommerce agencies and growth consultants. In the free guide, you’ll learn: How a headless PWA works in combination with top solutions including Shopify Plus, email, SMS marketing, reviews and user-generated content, affiliate marketing, subscriptions, analytics, and customer service What industry leaders in these respective categories have to say about going headless and enhancing functionality (including Littledata for analytics and some of our long-term partners like ReCharge for subscriptions and Refersion for affiliate sales) Real-world examples of merchant success To learn more, download the free guide from Nacelle. What about headless tracking? At Littledata, we do not see headless ecommerce as a passing fad. PWA tech has caught up to the needs of larger DTC brands, who want best-in-class technology at each customer touch point (eg. social microsites, one-click subscriptions, multi-currency payments, upsell funnels) alongside custom design and a deep cross-device user experience to match their brand story. As Nacelle explains, headless ecommerce now offers the possibility of not just integrating your current tools but actually improving the functionality of your Shopify Plus stack. Together we can build a shopping experience that is better, faster, more reliable, and more highly personalized. But without server-side tracking, getting accurate data about your headless Shopify setup can be extremely complicated. Check out our headless tracking demo to see how to automatically get complete sales and marketing data about your headless Shopify site in Segment or Google Analytics.

You may have noticed a new referral source appearing in your Google Analytics, or an increase in sales from the 'Referral' channel. This is a change Shopify made with the launch of the new Shop app, and can be easily fixed. What is Shop.app? SHOP by Shopify is a consumer mobile app, aggregating products and experiences from many Shopify merchants. It is heavily integrated with ShopPay, and so Shopify is now directing one-click checkout traffic to the shop.app domain instead of pay.shopify.com. How would SHOP fit into the user journey? There are two scenarios: 1. Customer is using Shop.app for checkout and payment Example journey: User clicks on Facebook Ad Lands on myshop.myshopify.com?utm_source=facebook Selects a product Logged in, and directed to shop.app for checkout Returns to myshop.myshopify.com for order confirmation In this scenario we should exclude shop.app as a referrer, as the original source of the order is really Facebook 2. End customer is using Shop.app for browsing / product discovery Example journey: User discovers product on shop.app Clicks product link to myshop.myshopify.com?utm_source=shop_app Logged in, and directed to shop.app for checkout Returns to myshop.myshopify.com for order confirmation Here, shop.app is the referrer but it will show up with UTM source How do I see the true source of the referral in Google Analytics? Firstly, you need to exclude shop.app as a referral source. Only in scenario 2 is SHOP genuinely a source of customers, and there the UTM source tag will ensure it appears as a referrer. Littledata's latest tracking script sets this up automatically. The second fix is harder. Unfortunately, at the time of writing, 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) channel. I've written a patch for our tracking script so that we set 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. Thirdly, you want to differentiate orders going through shop.app from the normal Shopify checkout. Littledata's Shopify app does this by translating the order tag shop_app into the transaction affiliation in Google Analytics, so the affiliation is Shopify, Shop App. 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.

What does the future of ecommerce look like in Poland? This week, I was honored to be invited onto a panel discussing ‘Riding the Wave of Ecommerce into the Future’ as part of the Ecommerce Trends Summit. Organized by MIT Sloan Management Institute Polska and the ICAN Institute, the summit offered a timely forum about ecommerce for a country rapidly undergoing digital transformation. As with all countries, Poland has seen a massive shift online post-Covid, and predominantly offline companies are scrambling to catch up with online-first retailers. These laggards were behind on use of modern ecommerce platforms like Shopify, but are now catching up fast as they understand the true cost of maintaining an excellent web channel. Since Shopify launched local language versions of their store admin in 2019 it has been a more popular choice for Europe-based companies, and Shopify is now heavily marketing in France, Germany and other countries. Many brands are extending across these markets, and at Littledata we've built multi-currency tracking into our main SaaS product for Shopify merchants. In the Shopify world, each country site is a separate-but-connected "country store" for localized shopping and payments. I’d expect more Polish companies to migrate to Shopify or other cloud solutions (WooCommerce, BigCommerce, etc) in the near future. The larger brands will likely choose Shopify Plus. [note]See the ecommerce trends we've identified during the COVID-19 crisis[/note] The other themes of the panel were more general to retailers globally: stores need smarter marketing, better personalization and a more unique sales proposition as competition heats up. In addition, Amazon.de (Amazon Germany) is just as big a threat to individual brands as elsewhere, but that makes it just as important for stores to own their own customer channel and direct brand experience. And that means running their own online store. Let’s hope Littledata gets to do more business with Polish ecommerce sites soon! [tip]Book Littledata CEO Edward Upton as an expert ecommerce speaker at your next online event[/tip]

This week, we're continuing our Q&A segment: Lunch with Littledata! We recently caught up with Casey Armstrong, CMO at ShipBob, to chat about the Shopify world, fulfillment, decision-making during COVID, Shopify analytics, and more. ShipBob is a tech-enabled 3PL that fulfills ecommerce orders for DTC brands; their mission is to make Shopify stores feel more successful online by providing reliable fulfillment solutions, warehouses near customers to help transit times, shipping costs, and the overall delivery experience. ShipBob also has a strong Shopify integration. [tip]Check out Littledata's top-rated Shopify app for Google Analytics -- with advanced tracking for Shopify Plus[/tip] Let's dive right in! Q: Has ShipBob’s core market changed during the crisis? Our core market has not changed since the COVID-19 pandemic started, but our core market has grown considerably. The reliance on selling direct-to-consumer and ecommerce has been steadily increasing year-over-year and now everybody who was hesitant or putting it off has to adapt immediately. "The reliance on selling direct-to-consumer has been steadily increasing" In addition, buyers are creating habits and becoming more comfortable buying online. This will impact retail forever. There is no going back to the percentage of retail occurring offline in the US. Q: Are you still seeing a big uptick in AOV when customers migrate to using ShipBob's fulfillment solution? This varies greatly by merchant, but by offering free shipping, fast shipping, or fast and free shipping, we have seen merchants see increases in AOV from 17% and up to 98% in extreme cases. Q: If you were personally to start an ecommerce business in North America right now, what would you sell? Happiness :) Q: What's the most common misconception ecommerce businesses have about fulfillment, or just 3PL solutions in general? The biggest misconception is that they have to be doing a lot of volume. That is not the case. In fact, ShipBob was built to democratize fulfillment for all ecommerce merchants. We have customers that are doing 50 shipments per month and customers that are doing well over 50,000 shipments per month. They both have access to the same fulfillment center network, run by the same warehouse management system, and they see everything in the same merchant application. Plus, we charge $0 for all of our software, including all integrations and our analytics tools. Q: Are a number of your Shopify merchants selling by subscription? Which apps are they using? Yes, we have a lot of merchants utilizing subscription offerings, so they can increase customer LTV and have a more predictable revenue stream. The most common applications we see now are ReCharge and Bold Subscriptions. [tip]See how you can track your subscription data with complete accuracy.[/tip] Q: Any tips for merchants who might be new to ecommerce? Know your numbers: COGS, customer acquisition costs, and fulfillment costs. Sounds basic, but if you don’t know your numbers, you can't efficiently scale your business or know which levers to focus on!   Quick links Littledata's partner program for Shopify Plus agencies and tech partners Free ebooks about how to improve Shopify analytics Headless Shopify tracking with Littledata

With over 1,700 positive reviews in the Shopify app store, Bold Subscriptions is a popular solution for Shopify merchants selling by subscription. It's plug-and-play but highly scalable for Shopify Plus. In order to really scale your subscription business, you need complete sales and marketing data. This doesn't just help with improving marketing ROI, but also increasing engagement and delighting your customers, which in turn leads to higher AOV and LTV. But whether you're on Shopify or Shopify Plus, subscription analytics can be complicated to set up manually -- not to mention ongoing maintenance and QA of your custom scripts and GTM containers. With that in mind, we are especially excited to announce an updated Bold integration that works for both Bold Subscriptions and Bold Cashier. Littledata's Bold Subscriptions connection enables advanced Google Analytics tracking so you can make sales and marketing decisions based on accurate data. Setup takes less than 15 minutes. Bold Subscriptions tracking Subscription customers are notoriously difficult to acquire, so it's especially important to figure out how to predict which new subscribers will stick with your business for years to come. Sales and marketing decisions ultimately come down to data about sales channels and retention. But do you trust your marketing channel breakdown? What about your LTV cohorts? Littledata's Bold connection works in tandem with our main Shopify connection to ensure complete data about subscription sales. Our Shopify app for Google Analytics and Shopify app for Segment both use a combination of server-side and client-side tracking to capture everything that happens in your Shopify store. You can connect your Bold checkout with just a few extra steps to get complete tracking. This includes: First-time subscription orders One-off purchases (regular Shopify sales) Recurring orders Refunds Not only that, but we stitch sessions together automatically so that the first-time purchase and recurring purchases are tied back to the original marketing channel. During the integration setup, we'll also ask you to create additional Views in GA so you can easily analyze subscriber behavior (like how a particular cohort of subscription box customers behaves over time) vs. first-time purchases (which channels or campaigns led to that initial sale).  [tip]Once you install Littledata, take advantage of our custom dimensions for tracking repeat repeat purchases and lifetime value. Learn more about our unique approach to LTV.[/tip] The data is available directly in Google Analytics or Segment (or any connected tools and platforms you might be using, such as Glew, Data Studio or Tableau). And our data layer works easily with GTM (Google Tag Manager). Marketing attribution The question we hear most often at Littledata is, "Why doesn't my Shopify data match Google Analytics?" This is just as true for Shopify as for Shopify Plus. As we've optimized our tracking solution for Shopify Plus (scalability, multi-currency tracking, cross-domain tracking, etc), we've found that marketing attribution is still a major pain point for stores that aren't using Littledata. Shopify is a phenomenal platform, it just needs a few extra integrations to make the plug-and-play apps work well with your data setup. Before Littledata Unless you have full-time developers who have built a custom solution for your Shopify tracking, you will likely see a lot of traffic attributed to "Direct" in Google Analytics, sometimes as much as 99%. We have found that 88% of Shopify stores have inaccurate data in Google Analytics, and the direct-traffic issue is especially bad, off by at least 20% for a majority of those stores! This means that without Littledata, your marketing analysis can feel a lot like guesswork (or endless hours piecing data together in Excel from all hour different ad platforms and sales tools). After Littledata Littledata's smart tech stitches sessions together automatically so that you'll see a much more accurate view of marketing channels, including email, PPC, paid search and referrals. Our Shopify apps use a combination of client-side and server-side tracking ensure that every user touch point is captured and sent back to Google Analytics. Adding the Bold Subscriptions integration extends this tracking to recurring Bold orders as well. See our help center for documentation about how Littledata's tracking works, or watch a quick demo video. [subscribe]  

If you're using Google Analytics to report on Shopify data, you need to watch this video. Ecommerce analytics were complicated, so we built a better way. Don't spend money on custom setups or expensive ETL configurations for your analytics. Just use this one automated tool.  Check out this quick demo of Littledata's popular Shopify to Google Analytics connection, available in the Shopify app store. Littledata is the easiest way to automate Google Analytics for your Shopify store. By connecting your Shopify store to Google Analytics, get: Smart audits to check for accurate tracking Seamless connections with apps like ReCharge and CartHook Benchmarks against thousands of ecommerce sites Easily extensible via Google Tag Manager (GTM) Own the data in Google Analytics And that's not all. We also add custom dimensions to track LTV and payment gateways like Klarna, Paypal and ShopPay. In the video above, see how the Littledata Shopify app for Google Analytics fixes tracking automatically. Fix your tracking Littledata works behind the scenes to fix your Shopify tracking and ensure accurate data. From marketing channels to checkout steps, Littledata's automated audit checklist gives you a clear picture of what to track and how to track it, and how each integration works. [note] Why doesn't Shopify match Google Analytics? Get the Shopify analytics ebook. [/note] Benchmark your Shopify site Say goodbye to guessing games and start benchmarking your site against top performers with Littledata's automated benchmark tool. Filter by industry, location, website size and more. We look at technical factors like server response time, as well as classic ecommerce benchmarks like conversion rates by device (mobile vs desktop). Check out the top Shopify benchmarks to get started. Automatic tracking for marketing and checkout apps Scalable tracking for Shopify and Shopify Plus Automated import of Facebook Ad Costs and Instagram Ad Costs Checkout flows like CartHook Subscription ecommerce apps like ReCharge and Bold Subscriptions  [note]Do you trust your Shopify tracking in GA? Here's a free guide to how you can[/note] If you're about to watch this video, chances are that you're still doing analytics by hand. Or you've tried other apps that were just connectors -- they didn't fix the tracking. Littledata works with popular reporting apps like Google Data Studio, Tableau and Power BI. Littledata's app for Shopify will give you an edge on the competition with accurate data across the entire customer life cycle. For ecommerce managers and developers With Littledata's smart script to fix your tracking, you can enjoy accurate data about marketing channels, product performance, transactions, revenue, shopper behavior and more! Check out our help center for documentation and free training on: Tracking the Shopify checkout funnel events The best GTM and Google Analytics data layer for Shopify How to use custom dimensions to calculate LTV We're here to help you make data-driven decisions based on accurate data. Let us keep up with the complications of webhooks, APIs and server-side tracking, so you can focus on scaling your business! Get started with a 30-day free trial for a full month of accurate Shopify data. [subscribe]