Not every metric in Shopify’s built-in analytics is accurate, therefore we do not recommend that you only look in Shopify. This does obviously not mean that the analytics of Shopify is faulty, on the contrary we encourage using this! But sometimes it is useful to use your own arsenal of data, and in this blog we will explain why and where to look.
Let’s talk about website sessions!
Website sessions are a good way to track traffic, and the overall popularity of your website. However did you know that this metric is also used to calculate your conversion rate? Yes that’s right…
Conversion rate is a valuable metric which can be used to determine the overall effectiveness of your website and marketing campaigns. Therefore sessions and orders need to be accurate for the conversion rate to be credible.
Here comes the punchline…
Sessions in Shopify analytics are not fully accurate.
Why do you ask? Well, let me explain!
Shopify analytics counts these sessions the wrong way… For instance, imagine you buy a shirt from a webshop. First you access their website (Shopify Session counter: 1). Secondly you go to the cart and press ‘Check-out’, then you get redirected to the payment page of the payment provider. After payment you get redirected back to the cart page (Shopify session counter: 2).
In other words. Shopify duplicates the sessions, even though this was one session. As a result Shopify will show a conversion rate that is much lower than it should be.
Well how do we fix this?!
Well, it is quite an easy fix… If you use the session from Google Analytics, you will always have the right amount! But this means that you have to manually calculate this. Another fix could be writing your own piece of software and collecting the data. But the best option is to read our vision below, and make a decision based on that!
Our vision
Shopify’s bread and butter is: E-commerce and tracking customer and order data. While Google Analytics’s craft is: Tracking internet traffic. Therefore always get data from different platforms, and combine these to track the right metrics with the correct values! Here at CroudX we use our own in-house analytics, which combines data from different platforms to create one outlet with all the right data and metrics. By using this: businesses are able to track valid data and create acceleration goals based on this. We have seen rapid growth with our clients!
Are you interested in our marketing services? or would like to have more information about our ways of working. contact us or call our headquarters that is based in Amsterdam: 085 020 8555.
We want to make marketeers think differently about marketing. Therefore we strongly believe that sharing knowledge is key. We will continue to share our knowledge weekly with the world so we can fulfill our mission. Until next week!
