How to Track Shopify Conversion Rate: Complete Step by Step Guide

Many new Shopify store owners focus on making the first sale without performance tracking. You should include conversion tracking in your setup plan for your new shop. Conversion tracking is a vital step in your new Shopify store setup. A Shopify conversion tracking flow makes a big picture of your revenue, or how much money you make every day. You can still calculate orders manually, but it is too time-consuming and not advisable hereafter. In this complete tutorial, we will point out the benefits of Shopify conversion tracking, basic tracking metrics, and provide small steps to help you begin building your conversion tracking flow. This step by step guide will show you exactly how to set up comprehensive tracking for your store. Whether you are a beginner or experienced merchant, this beginner guide will show you exactly how to track and optimize your conversion rates.

Benefits of Shopify Conversion Rate Tracking

A constant tracking flow helps you diagnose your marketing channels efficiency. Based on that, you can choose to increase the budget for some productive channels. You can also stop ones that bring no conversion or reduce concentration on weak ones.

Moreover, you can spot which product items carry the highest percentage of revenue. Thus, you can either keep importing monetary products or reduce or remove inactive ones.

The biggest value of a tracking flow lies in an insightful buy flow. From the monitoring dashboard, it will be easier for you to implement conversion-boosting activities.

Primary Shopify Conversion Tracking Metrics

Tracking metrics on Shopify goes beyond total revenue or number of successful transactions. Below are the must-have tracking metrics for your store.

Types of Shopify Conversion Rate Tracking Reports

Default Shopify Reports Dashboard

By default, Shopify has its Reports dashboard. You can find this dashboard by going to Admin > Reports. The biggest advantage of the default Shopify Reports dashboard is that it handles sales data much more accurately than any other third-party integrated tracking platforms.

On your Shopify dashboard, there are 2 types of reports:

Default Shopify Reports dashboard is a great start for new Shopify stores. You can instantly have an overview of your store performance without too many configurations. But as the store gets expanding, it will become much harder for you to get detailed insights. Besides, both default and custom Shopify reports are often fragmented, and there is no way to connect custom reports together. Thus, it is hard to track the entire customer buy flow from site visiting.

Facebook Conversion Rate Tracking Pixel

You can add your page Facebook Pixel ID to begin the monitoring flow by going to Admin > Online Store > Preferences. Then you can add the tracking pixel code for your Facebook marketing activities. To insert the right pixel code, you have to know how to set up conversion tracking on Facebook.

Google Analytics Conversion Rate Tracking Code

Similarly to Facebook tracking pixel, it is simple to connect Google Analytics to your Shopify store via the Online Store dashboard. A strong plus of Google Analytics tracking code is that you can track the total marketing performance across multiple channels, including Facebook. But if you want to audit your Facebook marketing effort thoroughly, you should look into your Facebook dashboard, starting with installing Facebook tracking pixel.

There are 2 levels of Shopify conversion tracking in Google Analytics:

Google AdWords Shopify Conversion Rate Tracking Tag

Unlike Facebook and Google Analytics, you have to use a brand new Google account to run AdWords ads. Only after you have paid the first Shopify monthly fee, you will receive few bucks of AdWords credit to begin running ads, as confirmed from Shopify. The amount of credit can differ based on country.

How Does Shopify Calculate Conversion Rate?

Analytics conversion rate is important because it determines the success of a Shopify store, a marketing campaign or an A/B testing variant. Higher conversion rates also lead to higher ROI for your eCommerce store.

Why Higher Conversion Rate Does Not Always Mean Better Performance

However, analyzing the conversion rate is a painful process. There are several factors that can mislead your interpretation of conversion data.

Small Sample Size Misleading

It is ridiculous when you sort the conversion rate column and see that a lot of marketing sources have 100% conversion rate because they have only 1 visitor and 1 conversion. This situation makes it easy to be mislead. Always look at both conversion rate and total visitor count together.

More Engaging Content Can Reduce Conversion Rate

Let us say you have a pure eCommerce site, with absolutely no content other than products. Your average customer comes to the site once a month and buys once every two months. To try and improve this, you add a blog to the site with really engaging content.

Suddenly, your average customer is visiting the site twice a week. To maintain your conversion rate, you would have to persuade your long, loyal customers to buy once per week, instead of once every two months. In other words, your site has most definitely improved, but it is very likely your headline conversion rate will go down.

Conversion Rates Vary by Visitor Type

New visitors may generate less conversion than returning visitors. A first-time visitor to your site who has never bought from you before, is far less likely to purchase than an old, loyal customer.

Visitors from different traffic sources or referrers will also differ wildly. Direct visitors will tend to convert more highly since they tend to contain more existing customers. Likewise, brand and non-brand search terms, generic vs long tail terms will vary too.

Low Shopify Conversion Rate: How To Fix

If your eCommerce store conversion rate drops, do not panic. Before trying to find a way to increase the conversion rate of your site, try to look deeper into these following metrics.

Step 1: Evaluate Your eCommerce Audience

In Google Analytics, from the left side panel, click Audience. From here, inspect Demographic > Geo/Location > Interest to see if you are targeting the right audience you have defined before.

After that, go to Behavior and inspect types of visitors (New or Returning). Your existing customers are swayed by brand, service, product quality, delivery, etc. Your new visitors are far more swayed by perception. If the number of returning visitors is getting lower and lower, try to think about the reason why people do not return to your website.

Is your content interesting enough to pull them back? Should you increase marketing budget to retarget old visitors?

Step 2: Break Conversion Rate by Landing Page and Channel

From the left side panel, click Acquisition tab, then click Channels. You will see your Shopify conversion rate for each channel. Instead of looking at the overall conversion rate, try analyzing conversion rate of individual channels and answer the question: In which channel, do you have the highest and the lowest conversion rate? In which channel does conversion rate drop? And Why?

From Acquisition, click All channels, then click Source/Medium. You can see what source of traffic has the highest conversion and which one has the lowest. In the secondary dimension search box, search "landing page".

Here you have a report about the conversion rate of each landing page. Try answering the question: "What landing page pulls the overall conversion rate down? And why?" Then fix the traffic source or landing pages that are performing badly.

Step 3: Check Time on Site and Bounce Rate

As Google explains, time on site is the average amount of time that users spend on your site, whereas bounce rate is the number of users dropping out from your site when reaching the first landing page, in comparison to a total number of users.

Time on site and bounce rate are two of the most important metrics in Shopify conversion tracking. You cannot expect users to buy from your Shopify store if they remain on your site for like 2 seconds and leave immediately without seeing around on your site for more product information.

Ad relevance is a factor that affects time on site and bounce rate. Online users, when clicking on your ads, expect to see what is being shown on the ads. Try to create advertisements that are relevant to your landing page content.

Besides this, try to create internal linking on your landing page, to link to other pages within your site. It is not only good for your Shopify store SEO but also keeps users on your site longer.

Finally, it is important to optimize the mobile version of your Shopify store. Nowadays, people are using mobile more and more when shopping online, tons of Shopify traffic comes from mobile devices so that mobile performance has a huge effect on your conversion rate. According to Shopify, the mobile-first design helps Shopify stores convert more.

To see if your Shopify store performs well on mobile or not, search Device Category in Secondary dimension, then click Advance search, and type in "mobile". In this way, you can find out which landing page is performing better or worse on mobile and which one should be fixed.

Step 4: Check User Flow Report

According to Google definition, User Flow report presents paths users took through your site, from the source or landing page or other dimensions, through the various pages, and where along their paths they exited your site.

The Users Flow report lets you compare volumes of traffic from different sources, examine traffic patterns through your site, and troubleshoot the efficacy of your site.

From this dashboard, search landing page to see which pages they go through and from which pages they drop. Grey lines present the flow of traffic, the red parts present where and how many users drop from each page. By looking at this graph, you may find out which source or landing page is generating the most traffic and which one has the highest bounce rate. Try to fix the source and landing page that have the most traffic but high bounce rate.

Shopify Marketing Tracking: Common Issues

Even when you have got an automatic system to track your marketing efforts, some problems might still happen.

Performance Data Discrepancies

The sales data between Shopify Reports and third-party tracking platforms does not always match. There are also some problems in performance data matching among different tracking platforms. You can track transaction statistics better in the default Shopify Reports, but it will be easier for you to track the overall marketing effort via Google Analytics tracking dashboard. And vice versa.

Moreover, because of the omnichannel marketing, a customer now has more reference places to consider and make a purchase decision than a few years ago. But not all tracking platforms are ready for that integration.

There are many reasons for this discrepancy:

Unorganized Dashboard

Any performance tracking platform is messy until you make something with them. In other words, if you just make basic setup and do not organize your dashboard well, you cannot make the most of the performance tracking. Similarly to getting the first sale, constructing a coherent Shopify conversion tracking flow requires a serious time and effort investment.

Order Duplication, Cancellation, and Refund

In eCommerce, you cannot avoid order duplication, cancellation, or refund. The problem is, no conversion tracking platform can automatically detect order mistakes.

Here are some methods to deal with this tracking noise:

Conversion Rate Tracking Quick Reference