Connect Shopify with Google Analytics and Improve Shop Performance

1. What is Google Analytics and what is it used for?
2. How is Google Analytics structured?
3. What is the goal of linking Shopify and Google Analytics?
4. What steps are necessary to set up Google Analytics in Shopify?

What marketing channels are your visitors coming from? How do they behave in your shop, and where are potential issues that lead them to abandon their purchase? These and many other questions can be answered with Google Analytics within a matter of minutes.

Assuming you have set up the tracking correctly and know where to find the relevant data for your responses. In the following, you will learn what to consider when setting up Google Analytics in Shopify why simply entering the Universal Analytics ID is not enough, and which reports you should regularly look at to improve the performance of your online store.

Note: This article refers to the current Universal Analytics. As of October 2020, Google Analytics 4 still does not offer one-click integration with Shopify, almost 1½ years later. If the difference is not known to you, feel free to read our article Universal Analytics vs. Google Analytics.

Table of Contents

1. What is Google Analytics and what is it used for?

2. How is Google Analytics structured?

3. What is the goal of linking Shopify and Google Analytics?

4. What steps are necessary to set up Google Analytics in Shopify?

What is Google Analytics and what is it used for?

Google Analytics is a Web analyzing tool, which allows you to understand the behavior of your shop visitors. It allows you to find out how your users landed on your page, how they navigate your online store, and whether they initiated and then completed a purchase.

Google Analytics works for all shop systems and on OMR Reviews you can compare other analysis tools.

How is Google Analytics structured?

Google Analytics is a free tool from Google that allows you to measure and monitor your shop or website performance and user behavior. Google Analytics is divided into 5 reports:

1. Real-time
2. Audience
3. Acquisition
4. Behavior
5. Conversion

1. Real-time Reports 

Since the data in Google Analytics only becomes visible with a delay of up to 30 minutes, you will find - as the name suggests - real-time data in the Real-time Reports.

Shopify and Google Analytics - Real-time Reports

These real-time reports are particularly important when you want to know what is currently happening in the shop or whether your tracking is still working (if you have changed anything).

2. Audience Reports 

In the Audience Reports, you will find all the information about the visitors in the shop.

Shopify and Google Analytics - Audience Reports

Interesting questions you can answer in the Audience reports: 

1. Where are your visitors coming from?
   
   What browser language do they use? Under Audience > Geography you can see where your visitors access your shop from and which browser language they use. Especially before opening up new markets, it is worth taking a look at these reports.
2. What is the distribution between new and returning visitors?
   
   Under Audience > Behavior > New and returning you can see how many new visitors you regularly attract to your shop. But beware: Google Analytics relies on cookies for the classification new vs. returning. That is, a visitor who does not allow cookies (or regularly deletes them) is always counted as a new visitor, as is a visitor using your shop with multiple devices.
3. With which devices do your visitors access the shop?
   
   When testing new features in the shop, you probably still look mainly at desktop, although a look at the Audience > Mobile > Overview Report quickly shows that the majority of visitors in most shops are now mainly on mobile.

Shopify and Google Analytics - Device Overview

3. Acquisition Reports

In the Acquisition Reports, you will find all information about how your visitors found you and how individual marketing channels and campaigns perform.

Shopify and Google Analytics - Acquisition Reports

Questions you should regularly ask yourself in the Acquisition Reports: 

1. What channels do your visitors use to get to the shop?
   Under Acquisition > All Access > Channels you can see from which channels your visitors accessed your shop, how high the bounce rates are (visitors come to the shop but then leave it again without taking any further action), and how much revenue you are making from the respective channels. Important insights that you can draw from this report: Which channel is your strongest? Are there any irregularities in terms of bounce and/or conversion rate between the channels? How are your key channels developing? Especially with regular weekly and monthly comparisons, you quickly see how certain metrics are developing and which channels are responsible for these (positive or negative) developments. Once you have identified weaknesses, you can delve deeper into the analysis and take corrective action.
2. What queries bring visitors to your shop?
   Both via Acquisition > Google Ads and Acquisition > Search Console you can see with which search queries visitors arrive at your shop. This often “hides” crucial phrases that are worth bidding on or long-term site and Optimize the online shop for search engines (SEO).

4. Behavior Reports

In the Behavior Reports, you will find all information about the pages your visitors enter and exit, how they navigate in the online shop, and what other actions (clicks, scrolls, etc.) they take.

Shopify and Google Analytics – Behavior Events

Interesting insights that can be learned from the Behavior Reports:

1. Where do my visitors enter my Shop?
   If you know where your visitors come from, the next exciting report can be found under Behavior > Website content > Landing pages. Here you can see where your visitors land, how many of them leave immediately (=> bounce rate), and whether landing on this page ultimately resulted in a purchase.
2. What pages do your visitors view when they enter on page X?
   Somewhat hidden in the same tab is an Entry Paths report. Here, for each of your landing pages, you can view which page was visited next and which page the visitors ultimately exited on.
3. What products/terms are your visitors searching for in the shop, and are there possibly terms for which no products were found?
   In the Site Search Reports (Behavior > Site Search), you receive a basic overview of how often the search is used in your shop, whether visitors exit after a search (% search exits), or whether they refine the search because they have not yet found what they are looking for or there are too many results.
4. Where do your visitors encounter errors?
   Also something that the Google Analytics integration from Shopify does not automatically generate but can be provided via the Google Tag Manager is error tracking. If your visitors encounter errors or some pages are not available at all, this results in poor user experience and often leads to the visit being aborted.

5. Conversions Reports

In the Conversions Reports, you will find all information about whether your visitors also achieve the desired goal set by you. From classic conversion goals such as making contact, signing up for a newsletter, to Enhanced E-commerce Reports and Multi-Channel Funnels.

Shopify and Google Analytics – Conersions Reports

Questions that you should regularly ask yourself in the Conversions Reports: 

1. How do your visitors behave in the shop?
2. At which step in the checkout process do visitors leave?
   Under Conversion > E-Commerce > Payment process you can see how your visitors behave during the checkout process, where they leave, and how many of them eventually make a purchase.

What is the goal of linking Shopify and Google Analytics?

As you can see, there are exciting reports and insights you can gain from Google Analytics about your visitors. Only when you correctly collect the data and regularly evaluate it, you will know how your visitors behave in the shop, where they can't proceed, and then take measures to improve the User Experience. But an important prerequisite for this is that Google Analytics is linked with Shopify and set up correctly.

What steps are necessary to set up Google Analytics in Shopify?

Setting up Google Analytics in Shopify is done quickly. In the Shopify backend, enter the Universal Analytics ID under Online Store > Configuration, anonymize the IP address, and check “Use Enhanced E-Commerce”.

Shopify and Google Analytics – Online Store Configuration

Next, go into Analytics and activate the enhanced E-commerce reports there too.

Shopify and Google Analytics – E-Commerce Settings

After that, Shopify is basically connected with Google Analytics. But to get the data in Google Analytics so you can use it meaningfully requires a bit more.

Note: If you don't have a Google Analytics account yet, you can set up Google Analytics in 5 steps. But beware: When you create a new property, Google Analytics always tries to sneak in the new Google Analytics 4.

This is currently only integratable via the Google Tag Manager. So, to create a Universal Analytics Property here, you need to select “Create Universal Analytics Property” under “Show options” during the new property creation.

What additional steps you should set up: 

1. Exclude your payment providers as referrals
   One of the most common problems I see (or don't see) in the setup of Google Analytics for Shopify: payment providers like Paypal, Amazon Pay, or Shopify Pay are not excluded as referrals. This results in these providers “stealing” the conversion from the original marketing channels at the last moment, as visitors are guided to a different domain during the checkout process and then led back. Due to the new referral (from Paypal, Hooks.stripe etc. Comment), Google Analytics assumes that this is a new entry from exactly this domain and overwrites the original source of the entry. To prevent this, you have to maintain the domains of your payment providers in the Property Settings under Tracking Information > Referral Exclusion List.
2. Strips URL parameters from your URLs to not unnecessarily inflate the reports
   URL parameters inflate the page and landing page reports unnecessarily, as they create multiple entries for the same page. A prominent example of this: the fbclid, which adds a dynamic string of numbers to the URLs for each of your visitors, so that each call appears as a new page in the reports (although it is actually the same page, regardless of who called it):
3. Group your pages according to template
   Optimizations often do not take place at the page level, but rather the entire layout of the product detail, category, or home page is closely examined and adjusted. For you to quickly see how bounce and conversion rates behave across all product pages, you should group your pages based on the template used. To do this, go to Content Grouping in the management tool and use the URL structure of Shopify for rule definition. This way, all pages containing the word “products” within the URL, for example, are assigned to the product detail pages, while everything containing /collection is allocated to the category pages.
4. Capture more events that support you in the analysis
   What errors do your visitors face? Which products are searched for in the shop, but for which no results are found? According to what criteria do product lists get sorted and how far do pages scroll? All these questions are not directly provided by the Google Analytics integration via Shopify, but ideally, you should get them via the Google Tag Manager. For this, you must integrate your Google Tag Manager code in the Shopify Google Analytics Settings:
5. Set up a classic goal for your checkout
   Since Shopify does not know a checkout funnel as standard, you have to set up this as a classic goal in Google Analytics. You go to Goal Setting in the administration, and specify the Thank You page as the goal URL, and subsequently set up the funnel with the respective steps in the checkout.