Combined Reporting: Shopify + Google Analytics
How do you get one set of numbers you can trust? askotter reads Shopify and Google Analytics together and answers it for your business, by text.
How does combined reporting with Shopify and Google Analytics work for a small business?
askotter reads Shopify and Google Analytics side by side so it can combine your accounts into one clean report you can ask questions of. One report covering every connected account, cleaned up and answerable by text.
Read the full answerShow less
The owner asks follow-up questions by text.
- From Shopify
- Orders and revenue, Product performance, Customer profiles and segments.
- From Google Analytics
- Sessions and pageviews, User demographics and geography, Traffic source and medium.
- Status
- Both connect today.
- Not for
- Replacing Shopify or Google Analytics. Both keep working exactly as they do now.
How do you get one set of numbers you can trust?
GA4 says one thing, Stripe says another, and your booking system disagrees with both. Matching them by hand takes hours, and the answer is still fuzzy.
How askotter handles it
askotter reads Shopify and Google Analytics side by side, so it can combine your accounts into one clean report you can ask questions of.
A person checks the result before it reaches you. This is part of our conversion rate optimization work.
How Shopify and Google Analytics records line up
Shopify and Google Analytics both carry an order or transaction number. When the same number appears on both sides the match is exact, one Shopify record to one Google Analytics record, with no guessing about which customer it was.
Shopify and Google Analytics can both hold the Google click ID that Google Ads adds to the landing page URL when auto-tagging is on. That ties one paid click to what the same visitor did afterwards.
Shared between the two: the order or transaction number, the Google click ID (gclid) and the UTM campaign tags.
What combined reporting uses from each
Combined reporting needs a shared identifier or a shared time grain.
From Shopify that means order IDs and customer emails. From Google Analytics it means transaction IDs, UTM tags and page paths.
What each tool sees on its ownShow less
Shopify on its own
Shopify sees the order and the landing page. It has no view of the ad impressions, emails or searches that came before that session.
Timing. Shopify writes each order the moment it is placed, including the landing page and referring site of the session that bought.
Access. Read-only access through the Shopify Admin API, approved from the store admin.
Google Analytics on its own
GA4 sees what people do on the site. It does not see refunds, repeat purchases made offline, or the deal a lead turned into later.
Timing. GA4 collects events in near real time, and Google says standard reports can take 24 to 48 hours to finish processing.
Access. The GA4 Data API with read access to the property.
Related guides
- Which Integrations Are Worth Connecting. An integration earns its place when it changes a decision. Most of them just move data from one screen you ignore to another.
- How to Track AI Traffic in Google Analytics. It is already in your analytics. It is just filed under Referral with everything else.
Services that use these connections
Other analyses: Shopify + Google Analytics
Questions about Shopify + Google Analytics
Do I need a developer to connect Shopify and Google Analytics?
How is askotter's Combined Reporting different from what Shopify shows on its own?
Connect Shopify + Google Analytics. Five minutes.
Plans are on the digital marketing pricing page.
Self-managed is $99/mo and scales with the compute you use. Our team runs it from $600/mo.