When you’re expanding your ecommerce business fast, you need a way to measure your success.
The best way to measure your gains on Shopify is to add Google Analytics (GA, for short) to your Shopify store.
This allows you to see how your store is performing, what your customers love, and what friction is getting in the way of conversions.
But with so many metrics and ways of measuring them, where do you start?
We’ll assume you’re sold on the benefits of site analytics and know the value of tracking key metrics.
If you need a better understanding of ecommerce analytics in general, you should start here.
In this post, we’ll cover:
Bear in mind the current iteration of Google Analytics on Shopify, Universal Analytics, will be sunsetting in July 2023.
Its replacement, Google Analytics 4 (GA4), will be available in Shopify in March 2023, and we’ll show you what you need to do to prepare.
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You’ve probably heard a lot about GA and its awesome powers, but why must you use it on your Shopify store? What does it add to your analytics armory that you don’t already have access to natively within Shopify?
Shopify has its own in-house analytics tool: Shopify Analytics.
What you get with Shopify Analytics depends on which plan you’re on. If you’re on the basic Shopify package or above, you’ll get:
There are some more advanced features that some Shopify customers will have access to for free. You can see a full list of functionality here.
Google Analytics offers you a much more advanced set of tools than you’d get by working with Shopify Analytics alone.
This isn’t to say that Shopify Analytics has no place in your work.
The handy dashboard feature and the tightly-focused reports you can generate will add value when figuring out how your site is performing, particularly when it comes to sales.
A little later on, we’ll run through the things you should track with GA and the metrics best monitored from inside the Shopify platform.
But for now, let’s get clear on what GA is and what it can add to your analytics regime:
The in-depth insights you get with GA hand you a huge advantage when it comes to measuring how successful your site is at appealing to customers and moving them through the customer journey.
Adding GA to your Shopify store and using it regularly will help you:
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If you’ve gotten this far, you don’t need us to tell you about the importance of clean, insightful data to your ecommerce operation.
But it’s surprising the number of marketers who don’t use (or more often, don’t use optimally) analytics tools like GA.
One of the most common mistakes marketers make is not setting GA up properly in the first place.
This mistake is compounded by a lack of understanding of how the tool works. It means marketers are less likely to check in with GA regularly and so lose track of critical metrics and how your site’s performing against your goals.
Some marketers make mistakes in the opposite direction: they expect GA to be the fount of all wisdom and tell them everything they need to know to run their site, attract new customers, and drive sales.
As we’ll see, GA is a powerful tool, but to get the most from it, you need to learn how to set up Google Analytics and use it properly, which we’ll get into later.
The current version of GA that Shopify customers are on is Universal Analytics, but Google announced they will be sunsetting this version in July 2023.
To replace it, they’ve launched Google Analytics 4 (also known as GA4), which will be available on Shopify in March 2023.
GA4 is better adapted to the needs of today’s ecommerce market. Google has summarized its capabilities and the differences with Universal Analytics here. It will:
In the setup guide below, you’ll find links and instructions on how to prepare for GA4.
In general, the types of metrics that you should be tracking:
Some metrics you should monitor using Shopify Analytics, while others are best tracked with GA.
Since Shopify Analytics is an organic part of your store, it’s really good at giving you information on sales and product performance. You should use Shopify’s platform to keep track of these.
Google Analytics is best for analyzing your site’s performance, how customers behave on it, and where your traffic is coming from.
The first thing to understand about this process is that there are two levels to your GA setup:
The first thing you should do is create a Google account for your brand and sign up for a new GA account (assuming you don’t already have one).
Doing this is very simple, it’s just a matter of registering your details with GA.
After you’ve done this, GA will prompt you to create a GA property.
A property is a little like a profile, you can set up as many as you want within GA and associate particular sites with each one.
If you have several brands or stores you want to measure separately, you can do so by setting up a different property for each. You can also associate multiple sites with one property.
If you only have one store, you only need to set up one property.
However, for Shopify store owners there is currently a small complication here. As we’ve flagged above, Google is phasing out Universal Analytics and wants to set up all new customers on GA4.
But as Shopify doesn’t yet support GA4, you will have to set up a Universal Analytics property for now, and then make the transition when support becomes available.
Be careful here, GA defaults to setting up a GA4 property, so make sure you’re setting up a Universal Analytics property here.
To do this, click on ‘show advanced options’.
Then select ‘create universal analytics property only’.
GA4 lands on Shopify in March 2023, and Google will stop processing data from Universal Analytics from July 2023.
But to help users with the transition, they’ll still make data available for a period of time after this.
Once you’ve created your account and property, you’re ready to connect your Shopify store to GA.
On the next screen, you’ll see a text field with some code in it. This is your global site tag and provides an identifier for Google Analytics to track your site
Copy this tracking code snippet, go to your Shopify admin panel, Go to Online store > Preferences, and paste the code into the Google Analytics box.
This is where to put the Google Analytics code in your Shopify account.
And that’s all you need to do to get set up on Google Analytics with Shopify. After this step, you’re ready to make some basic configurations.
Adding the global site tag to your admin panel will give your Shopify site a basic way of tracking site data.
But if you want to go deeper than this and track more granular interactions with your site, you will need to add a tracking tag to each web page that contains things you want to track.
This is where Google Tag Manager comes in.
It gives you a simple way to add tags to your pages without the need to get into the coding of your site.
If you’re getting set up on Universal Analytics in preparation for the move to GA4, from March 2023 you will be able to migrate your tags.
But this is not necessarily going to be a straightforward process, so it may be better to just get set up with the basic global tag for now and wait until GA4 becomes available in Shopify.
If you want to know more about the details of GTA and how to use it with Google Analytics, this article is very informative.
So you’re all set up on Google Analytics. But what now?
If at this stage, you’re staring blankly at the confusing array of options, filters, numbers, and graphs on the screen, you’re not alone.
You need to make some customizations that will let you understand all this data.
You can create several ‘views’ in each of your GA properties.
These views apply different filters to the data coming in, so you can more clearly see the specific metrics you want to analyze.
It’s important to understand that the names we’ve given the views here, and similar ones you might come across elsewhere, are just standard naming conventions.
There is no ‘pre-set’ view to choose from in GA, and you can name and configure your views exactly as you please.
But regardless of the technical setup and what you call them, there are some views that every ecommerce brand should set up:
To set up views, go to ‘Admin’ in your GA dashboard and, in the far left column, click the ‘create view’ button.
Note: In GA4, separate ‘views’ have been replaced with a single view to which users can apply filters.
Once you’ve set up GA, you can choose to stick with the basics or enable enhanced analytics.
Installing enhanced analytics will give you access to a wealth of data that is not available in the basic version.
Enhanced analytics is still free but can take a little bit more effort to set up.
But once you are set up, you can see things like how your customers enter your sales funnel, how they move through it, what your click-through rates are, etc.
For a full rundown of the features and benefits of enhanced analytics and instructions on how to install it, take a look at our guide.
If you’re just starting out with GA, you might want to take some time to familiarize yourself with the basics before installing the enhanced version.
But if you’re serious about maximizing the customer journey and your site’s potential, then you’ll want to get started on enhanced analytics as soon as possible.
The reports section of your GA panel lets you view different data sets from the same place. Building reports will let you track certain things:
In Universal Analytics you can set up goals to track how well your site is performing. Goals record if a visitor takes a specific action during a session.
Goals have been very useful for merchants to measure KPIs, see which parts of their site are performing well, and which parts need working on.
But they only measure whether an action was taken at all during a session, not how many of those actions were taken.
GA4 measures events rather than individual sessions.
It’s a welcome change in approach, but one that makes goals somewhat obsolete. So rather than setting up goals to measure, in GA4 you can track conversion events.
When a visitor takes a specific action, and you’ve told GA4 this action is a conversion event, it will log it as such, and keep on logging it—regardless of how many times the visitor takes the action during any one session.
But no matter if you’re tracking goals or conversion events, the things you should be measuring are broadly the same:
You can find out more about the technical differences between goals and conversion events here. There’s also a very detailed guide on how to set up conversion events properly here.
If you can’t wait for GA4 to start tracking your conversions, this article from Google has a great run-through on how to set up goals in Universal analytics.
All the data and analysis in the world won’t mean anything unless you can find a way to put it into action.
Shogun Page Builder Advanced lets you design and re-design your pages and elements with ease, scaling and syncing them across multiple stores.
If you want to change something in light of your learnings from Google Analytics, or you’re just at the start of your site creation journey, Shogun provides the tools to create high-converting pages and sites without the need for coding.
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