Conversion tracking in Shopify, as in any other eCommerce platforms, is crucial to your business growth. There comes a saying “If you can't measure it, you can't improve it.” Even for a super small or a new store, if you don't spend a particular amount of time and effort to track your statistics well, then it'd be harder to know the problems and where to improve your store for better revenue. A clever tracking dashboard is like your assistant. It helps you detect which marketing channels have the highest ROI, which product items bring most top revenue, whether your customers love purchasing on weekend nights or not, etc.

In this article, I'll show you how to connect eCommerce data from Shopify to Google Analytics to better measure your sale performance.

Connect Shopify Store with Google Analytics

Before starting with eCommerce tracking on Shopify, please make sure that you have already connected your Shopify store with Google Analytics. If you have installed Google Analytics on your store, you can ignore this step and go further with the next step: configure Shopify Google Analytics conversion tracking.

There are 2 types of Google Analytics data - Classic Analytics and Universal Analytics. While Classic Analytics is about session-centric, Universal Analytics is more about visitor-centric.

Google recommends you to choose Universal Analytics since this new Analytics provide you more insightful statistics about your visitors.

First, sign in to your Google Analytics account (or sign up if you haven't had a Google Analytics account).

Choose Google Analytics, then go to Admin > Account > Create a new account to add a new Google Analytics account for your store. You can add up to 100 Google Analytics account per Google account.

Select “Website" tab, then enter necessary information fields about your website. You can skip the “Data sharing settings” section since it's not important. Then click “Get Tracking ID" to save your changes and get the tracking code snippet.

Finally, you can get the Google Analytics Tracking ID code snippet. Please copy this tracking ID code snippet to your clipboard.

Open a new browser tab then get into your Shopify Admin Dashboard. Go to Admin > Sales channels > Online Store > Preferences. Then scroll down to Google Analytics, and paste the above tracking ID code snippet here.

Setup conversion tracking with Google Analytics

There are 2 ways to implement Google Analytics conversion tracking on your store:

• Basic eCommerce Tracking: if you only want to track basic statistics on revenue and transaction
• Enhanced eCommerce Tracking: if you want to dig deeper into customer’s behavior and interactions

Setup basic conversion tracking

Go to your Google Analytics admin dashboard. Choose your Account, Property, and View that you want to track. Click on Ecommerce Settings.

At the first step of Ecommerce Settings, switch “On" to enable eCommerce tracking. Then save your change.

You can either use eCommerce tracking now or continue with enhanced conversion tracking.

Setup enhanced conversion tracking

Only after you have finished basic conversion tracking, you can turn on enhanced conversion tracking.

To use enhanced conversion tracking, you have to enable it from both Shopify side and Google Analytics side.

Shopify side

From your Shopify Admin Dashboard, open Sales Channels > Online Store > Preferences, then scroll down to Google Analytics, then check use Enhanced Ecommerce" to turn on eCommerce tracking from Shopify part.

Google Analytics side

Open your Google Analytics Admin Dashboard, pick up the View that you have enabled basic conversion tracking, then choose Ecommerce Settings. On the second step of Ecommerce Settings, switch “On" for Enhanced Ecommerce Settings. Then submit your change.

Congratulations! Google Analytics tracking is now ready to run on your store.

If you need more help in Google Analytics configurations, joining a conversion on Shopify forums is a great interactive way to discuss the problems with other new Shopify merchants like you.

In the upcoming blog posts, I'll have more guidelines on how to deal with problems in Google Analytics eCommerce tracking, as well as how to setup tracking funnels. Have a nice weekend and stay tuned!