Can you rely on Shopify's tracking alone?

Data is power. If you can accurately track your web, marketing and sales performance and forecast sales trends, it can mean the difference between thriving, or surviving.

If you’ve been on Shopify a while, you’ll have seen that it provides its own tracking tool and analytics. But, are these enough, or should you invest in custom tracking solutions?

Shopify's built in tracking - the good bits

To decide, we need to first take a look at the pros and cons of Shopify’s built in tracking. There’s a few key advantages:

• Ease of use: it requires no set up and automatically tracks your sales, traffic and conversion data.
• Performance: Shopify’s inbuilt tools provide a valuable contribution when it comes to understand web performance. If you're looking to lightly monitor your site's KPIs, you can't go too wrong with Shopify's built in tools.
• Marketing: it provides performance insight from a variety of different channels such as Facebook, Google and email. You can also get a decent overview of your customers and their behaviour.
• Accuracy: Shopify should always be your golden record for all things sales. We commonly see up to 10% discrepancies between Shopify and other platforms so it’s important to have a reliable source of truth for your most important KPI.

As an aside, Shopify's "Live View" is a fun dashboard that shows you where in the world your site users are visiting from in real time. You could even have it permanently on a screen in your office... rock on 🤘

For smaller businesses, these built in tools provide a valuable contribution when it comes to understand web performance. However, there are limitations to Shopify’s built in tools when it comes to larger or more data driven brands.

Shopify's built in tracking - the bad bits

Shopify’s inbuilt tools do provide a decent overview but they can lack the detail and the custom insights that businesses need for advanced decision making that goes beyond the basics.

• Session attribution data: is often not clear, making it more tricky to see which marketing touchpoints result in conversions.
• Product page views: Shopify doesn't surface PDP (Product Detail Page) viewed data. Therefore, you don't have full visibility into the micro conversions along your purchase journey that are crucial for understanding your visitors' experience and optimising your website.
• Customisation: Shopify doesn’t allow you to track custom events so as soon as you want to track something that isn't already built in, you're stumped. This makes it nigh on impossible to gather specific insights into user behaviour including product engagement before purchase, checkout funnel drop-offs, or micro-conversions (email submissions, video views, button clicks).

Shopify's native GA4 integration - the good bits

Shopify's native integration with GA4 is a great way to circumnavigate the immediate limits of Shopify's built in analytics tools. It's easy to set up, and it provides a good (if not slightly generalised) overview of your site's performance.

It opens up the all-important Purchase Journey report (our favourite pre-built report in GA4), which is a great way to see a more complete picture of your customers' journey to purchase and identify opportunities to improve your visitors' experience on your site. And, via the Explore view, now you can start answering questions like "how many products are visitors viewing, on average, before making a purchase?"

Furthermore, you'll have mulitple marketing channels (and potentially other sales data sources, too) that you'll want in a unified view and GA4 is arguably the best of a bad bunch - particularly if you're looking for a free solution.

Shopify's native GA4 integration - the bad bits

I won't go into the weeds of the pros and cons of GA4 here, but it's worth noting that it's by no means a perfect solution and there are some limitations to what it can do on the free tier. Plus there's an annoyingly large learning curve to get to grips with it which feels extremely painful if you were familiar with Universal Analytics (the previous version of GA).

If conversion rate optimisation is your main focus, then you'll likely find that solely having GA4 integrated via the off-the-shelf Shopify integration doesn't add a huge amount of value. Apart from the Purchase Journey report, there's not a whole lot of genuinely useful data you'll have immediately available.

Custom tracking solutions

With a custom tracking setup (e.g. using Google Tag Manager, server-side tracking, or a bespoke analytics stack), businesses can collect and store data without relying solely on Shopify’s data processing. For example, if you have a quick view component on your product cards to allow users to view additional product data without having to go to the PDP, with a custom tracking solution you can track that as a micro-conversion and optimise towards it. It's worth saying that this can be layered over the top of your native Shopify GA4 integration and you're not.

If you’re looking for more accurate attribution models (which, of course you are, right?!) you can integrate GA4 or a customer data platform to give you data driven attribution, rather than last click, or first click models.

A custom solution can also provide you with a more holistic view of your site, for example, you can align the data from Shopify, Meta, Google ads, email marketing and other external campaigns. Then, when you come to analyse the data, you can see the whole picture in one go, rather than having to spend time gathering the data from different sources and cross referencing.

Final thoughts

For smaller enterprises and those that prefer a simple overview, Shopify’s built in tracking is a solid choice. But, if you’re thinking of scaling your business, cranking up the marketing campaigns or you just require more accurate attributions, a custom tracking set up is likely to be a better long-term strategy. Ultimately, the decision should be based on your data needs, your marketing complexity as well as how much control you want over your analytics.

Still a bit unsure? Drop us a line, we can talk through your goals, your current set up, and where we’d make some improvements.