Shopify Google Analytics Setup (Enhanced Ecommerce)

This is complete a-z step by step checklist. Perfect for handing off directly to a Virtual Assistant or team member to complete.

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Template Process Created by: Corey Purnell (view more of my templates)

Ecommerce Paid Marketing Expert & Agency Owner

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Best Practices

Use 1 Google Analytics snippet per domain (or Shopify store)

Have One Original View

Exclude IP Addresses of Anyone Who Works on Shopify Store

Use consistent naming conventions (OnlineMetrics blog article)

Best practices get you rigorous and understandable data. It is a short list of the most important ones you need to be concerned about for your Shopify store to make analytics simple to manage and accurate.

If you have two stores that are different businesses with the URLs storeone.com and storetwo.com, use different properties, which means a different analytics ID. If the websites are similar businesses that serve different regions and you give users the option to swap between the stores, use the same property ID then setup cross-domain tracking as indicated in the guide to retain the original traffic information. You can then filter the views to get store-specific information.

Classic Analytics is ancient and hardly supported. Universal gives you more flexibility like custom dimensions that is great for highly-targeted remarketing. The new gtag.js is not supported.

Some old Shopify themes are pre-installed with Google Analytics. I haven’t seen this for years though. Check to see if yours does otherwise your data will be wrong. Visit the home page of your site then view the source code to see if any of the scripts ga.js, dc.js, or analytics.js are present. I recommend you use the analytics code in Shopify as taught in this guide rather than hard-coded in the theme because you are future-proofed with analytics updates done by Shopify and your theme developer.

You want at minimum two views. One view should have no filters. It is your benchmark to see what goes on. Name it something like, “Your Store Name – Original View”, “Your Store Name – Filtered View”, or the default “All Web Site Data”. If you currently have one view, create a new one then make that your untouched view. It is critical to do for this guide. Your other views should have filters, ecommerce tracking, goals, and all the fancy jazz that changes data you collect. This means if you setup User ID tracking, you have to configure the view with the steps in this guide to receive clean data.

It distorts data. Google search “IP address” to discover yours. Inside your Google Analytics, go to “Admin”, select the view you can edit, and click “Filters” then create exclude filter

An annotation is a time-relevant comment you insert into Google Analytics below most line graphs. Annotate changes to analytics. When you analyze and report in the future, you have possible explanations for unusual data changes. “Why did our time on site increase and user sessions decrease? Oh, I see in the annotation we blocked referral spam.” If you are actively involved in your marketing, take advantage of the feature by annotating major marketing events like the day you got a mention by an Instagram influencer or a spam warning by Google Search Console.

Intro to Google Tag Manager

Once I figured how to use GTM, I've been in love ever since. It makes it sooo much easier to update tracking pixels & setup analytics. 

FYI - whenever I say:

• "GTM" that's the same as "Google Tag Manager"
• "FB" that's the same as "Facebook"

Think of GTM as a portal. When you install this portal on your site's code (just once), afterwards you can quickly and easily add extra code, pixels or fire data layer variables without having to update any code on your Shopify theme.

Ex: I want fire a Facebook custom conversion pixel only on pages that contain "corey-is-awesome" in the url.

Slow Way (takes hours or days if you don't how to code)

• Navigate to Themes > Edit Code
• Figure out how to use Shopify liquid (code that shopify themes are made on) page rules, forloops & if statements to fire this tag (it's scary at 1st, basically looks like chinese)
• Insert Facebook code between inside this page url filter code
• Then publish these new code changes to your live site
• Better hope you didn't have typos in your code or else you might break something if you're not careful
• And guess what you just saved a new version of your theme. There's no undo button for certain parts of shopify (like CSS). And no easy way to revert a gagillion incorrectly manually installed tracking codes that are buried deep in thousands of rows of codes if you don't backup theme before you start.
• And that was just 1 Facebook custom conversion. What if you have 10?

Super Fast Way (< 60 seconds. I timed myself)

• After GTM is installed
• create URL-based trigger (like "page path" contains "corey-is-awesome"
• Save trigger
• Create tag
• Select HTML (custom code)
• Paste in Facebook custom conversion pixel HTML (FB makes it easy, just copy paste for most uses. No extra code edits required)
• Use the URL-based trigger you created above
• Save & Press Preview Live Version (just to make it works only on your browser before pushing live across entire site)
• If preview looks good, Publish GTM workspace live & you're done! (and whenever you publish, you can add notes for exactly what changes you made making it even easier to revert mistakes down the road)
• More than 10 FB custom conversions, no problem? You can quickly duplicate trigger & tags in just 2 clicks, slightly change what you need then publish
• All without having to manually change any code on your site

If you're on Shopify Plus, you have access to your checkout page. It's best to install Google Tag Manager on ALL of your shopify pages (1 GTM container per store)

Make sure you've already installed Google Analytics. Follow steps in Start Here section "Install Google Analytics" before proceeding.