Using Google Analytics 4 on Shopify Stores

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Over the last 6 months I’ve been using GA4 every single day on my Shopify stores, so I’ve got a solid understanding of how you can use it to grow your store.

Google Analytics is a free tool provided by Google. It’s a little piece of code that sits in the back of your store and tracks all the movements your visitors make. It tracks what they click, where they go and whether they buy something, but it also tracks where they come from.

We can actually find out where someone found your link. They might have clicked it on a Facebook ad, on a blog or in Google. We can find that out when they land on your store, and then we can work out whether where they came from was a great way to drive sales. We can also look at what’s working on your site and what’s not, where people are leaving and where they’re engaging. All of these things help you optimize your store and your traffic so that you can really grow your business.

Reports

When you first get into Google Analytics you’re going to come to a page that is okay but doesn’t really give us much information, so we need to dig a little bit deeper. Over on the left we’ve got Reports, Explore and Advertising. The area you’re going to want to play with from a basic level is Reports. Reports is broken down into a couple of different sections. You’ll see one here called Life cycle, you may see one called Business objectives, or you may see something else. We can customize this to the view that we want because Google Analytics can be used by a whole heap of different businesses.

Collections

It doesn’t just need to be Shopify stores or e-commerce businesses. If you’re running a blog or a service business, you’ll also use Google Analytics. Google has broken these up into little collections so that we only look at the data we need, and these are the reports we need to find for the type of business we have. I’m going to show you the one that I use for e-commerce so that you can set it up on your store and remove all the other ones.

Library

To update this we’re going to click over into Library, and we’re going to see a section called Collections. You’ll probably have all these predefined collections in here. If you’ve got more than one, or you’ve got the Business objectives one or something else, click over here and unpublish the ones that you don’t want. For the ones that you do want, make sure they are published, and that will bring them over to the left here. We only really use the Life cycle one at this stage. Once you’ve done that, we’re going to go back and have a look at some of these predefined reports, so we’ll click Acquisition and then Acquisition overview.

Acquisition

Acquisition is basically where we’re getting our visitors from. Think of it as traffic sources, or where people click out on the web before they hit your store, so we’re acquiring people into our store. This overview is relatively helpful but I like to dig a little bit deeper, so we’re going to go straight into something called Traffic acquisition.

Traffic Acquisition

Traffic is where people come from, the visitors that get driven into the store. We often break traffic into what we call channels. Paid channels are the ones where we pay for people to come to our store, organic is free traffic, and referral is a link from somewhere else. This is how Google Analytics breaks them up, so we’ve got paid, organic, referral and direct.

Source and Medium

When you log into yours it’s going to look a little bit like this. Mine has been slightly customized and I’ll show you how I’ve customized it, but the way this screen works is that we can adjust it based on the data that we want to see. Right now it’s got a default channel group, and if we think about what I mentioned before around organic, paid or direct, it clumps all the different types of traffic into one category. We like to find out a little more, because if we’re paying for traffic we want to understand whether we’re paying in Google, TikTok or Facebook, so we can expand this out to get more information.

In GA4 we can click in here and choose source and medium. For those of you that have used Universal Analytics in the past, you’ll understand this concept. The source is Google and the medium is the way they got there. If it’s Google paid, it came from an ad on the Google search engine. If it’s Google organic, it came from a search listing.

Reading the Channel Data

If we look at the breakdown here, we can see Google CPC, which is paid cost per click, and we’ve got Google organic. We can see the same for Facebook, and this is a little bit messy. It has to do with UTM tagging and the move from Meta to Facebook. UTM tags are a whole other subject, and they’re really useful if you want to get down and dirty with your data. We can also see email campaigns, Facebook again, and Ring Pop as the referral, so think of that as links back.

The data gets really interesting here because at a channel level we can see the types of sessions we’re getting, whether they’re converting and whether they’re not. From Google CPC we can see this site is heavily relying on ads, with 4,000 users and 5,900 sessions.

Users and Sessions

The difference between users and sessions is that a user is one person, and sessions are the number of times someone visits a site. Say I visited this site five times. That’s one user and five sessions. That’s how you can understand how many people are using the store. We’ve also got engaged sessions, conversion rate, total revenue and bounce rate. You’re probably going to see different columns to this, because I’ve customized this report to the things that I want to see. These are important metrics to me. I want to see how engaged people are, whether they’re bouncing, whether they’re converting, and how much money those pages are generating for me.

Customizing Reports

To customize these reports, pop over here on the right hand side and click customize. We can go through here and add all the different metrics we want to this report. I’ve clicked into metrics and you can see they’re all in here. I’ve added bounce rate, conversion rate, conversions and revenue, but you can click down here and add anything you like. As an example, maybe we want to put in quantity, so how many units people have purchased. Let’s click apply and see what happens, and we can see the quantity that has been purchased.

All this data comes in directly from Shopify or whichever e-commerce store you have plugged in, so you can adjust this report to anything you want it to be. The stats I like to see are revenue, bounce rate and conversion rate, because from there we can understand which channel is performing and which isn’t, and we can go into those channels and see what we need to do with them. Do we need to increase ad spend if a channel is performing really well? Do we need to optimize the ad campaign? Do we need to send more emails? Do we need to do better SEO?

Why Channel-Level Data Matters

You can see the value of this by comparing it to the analytics in your e-commerce platform. In Shopify we only see an overview of what’s happening on the store, like total sessions and average conversion rate, but in here we can see it at a channel level. That’s a big part of how we can scale our e-commerce businesses. After we’ve made changes to the report, we choose save changes to current report and click save, and this saves it permanently in your account. We’ll click back and we can see that Traffic acquisition is there, and you’ll see this little message next to it: sessions.

Trend Lines

I love to look at trend lines to see how things are going, so I’m going to open this range up to last month. This is telling us how many sessions we got by source and medium over time, but I actually want to see how much revenue I got from each channel over time.

If we click total revenue, this changes and we now see total revenue by session source. We can see Google CPC and it highlights the trend line, then Google organic and it highlights the trend line, then direct, Meta, Facebook and so on. So we can see whether the changes we make in ad campaigns, or the emails we send, have an impact over time. It’s a really useful metric to understand.

Pages and Screens

Now that we know where our traffic’s coming from, let’s have a look at how people are behaving on our site and what they’re doing. I click over here to Engagement and then Pages and screens. Pages and screens shows the pages that people land on in your store, and we can look at it at a page level to see how well those pages are performing. If we have a look here, this is a boxing glove store and we can see what people are clicking on. We can see how many views each page has, how many users hit that page, how many views per user and how long they’ve stayed on the store.

This one isn’t tracking revenue because of the type of tracking we have. We’re using something called server-side tracking, which is a little more advanced and gives us better data elsewhere, but we lose this data. If you’re using the standard Shopify integration, you will see revenue in here. For us it’s okay at this stage because we just look at things like engagement time and engagement rate. Engagement rate as an example is how long they spend on the page. The higher the engagement rate the better they are on the page, and with a lower engagement rate we might need to look at why they’re leaving. These are the stats you should be looking at: engagement rate, total revenue, time on page and how many pages people are visiting.

Landing Pages

The next thing to look at when it comes to engagement is landing pages. A landing page is the page someone first lands on when they get to your store. We do the same thing as we did with pages and screens, and have a look at how many people are engaging with the page, whether they’re leaving when they hit it and, if so, why. Let’s have a look at this. We can see that the homepage, which is this one here, gets the majority of our visitors, which makes sense.

We have a really high engagement rate here, 80%, which means that 80% of the people who land on that page stay on it or move to another page. 21% or basically 20% leave at this point in time. We look at that and ask whether we’re okay with it, and yes we are. Obviously we’d like it to be 100% of people, but it’s pretty rare to get that on your homepage.

We look through here and can see other pages, and these go down over time. Let’s have a look at this one, where we’re seeing the page drop a little lower. I know why that is: we’re running out of stock of that product. But at a landing page level we can see how much revenue someone landing on this page is actually generating for us, and we can see a nice bit of revenue coming through on those pages.

Purchase Journey

Now that we know how people engage on pages, the next thing to do is understand how the e-commerce funnel works. Let’s pop over here to Monetization and go into Purchase journey. The e-commerce purchase journey is a really important way to help us increase our e-commerce conversion rate. A conversion is when someone visits the store and makes a purchase. If 100 people visit the store and only one makes a purchase, we’ve got a 1% conversion rate.

Purchase Journey Steps

There are a couple of steps that go into getting someone to a sale, and that’s the purchase journey. When we looked at my stats a second ago, we saw most people hit the homepage. From the homepage they’ll probably hit a collection page, then from a collection page they go to a product page, then they click add to cart, then they go to checkout and buy the product. That’s the ideal e-commerce journey.

But people fall off that funnel all the way through. They might not even hit a product page, they might not click add to cart and they might not reach the checkout. By looking at these stats in detail we can understand where the break in the funnel is. We want to see how many people are hitting a product page, because if they don’t get to a product page they’re not going to buy. We want to see how many are clicking add to cart, and if they’re not, why. We want to see how many got to the checkout, and if they didn’t, why. And then how many went from checkout to buying, and if they didn’t, why.

How This Works on This Store

This store shows that of the 100% of people who started a session with us, only 52% viewed a product. That could be because they browsed the product on the collection page and then went through to the product detail page from there. Of the 52%, 16.7% added to cart. From there, 48% of the 16.7% started a checkout, and then only 46.7% of people actually made a purchase.

By looking at this we can understand where the funnel needs improving. Imagine we got more people to view a product. That alone would increase our add to cart rate, checkout starts and purchase rate, and bring everything up, so that would be our first objective on this store. The second thing would be how we improve add to cart rates, how we make sure more people are adding things to cart and what we could do there. Then we can look at how quickly we can get people to the checkout and how easy we make it for them to purchase.

Mobile, Desktop and Tablet Level

You can also see this at a mobile, desktop and tablet level, which is really useful because a lot of people do these tests on a desktop but never look at how the mobile experience works. I had one brand I was working with that was getting terrible mobile conversions. They said they needed to get their mobile site up and running, optimize it and change it because it just wasn’t working, but they’d never actually tested it themselves on mobile.

I opened it up on my phone and clicked add to cart. When I went to the cart, a little live chat button popped up over the checkout button, which meant I couldn’t click checkout. We moved the live chat button so the checkout button was visible, and in that case their mobile conversion rate went up straight away. They never would have known that if they weren’t looking at it in detail, so this is where the numbers are really important.

How I’m Using Google Analytics Every Day

I spend about 10 minutes every morning going in, checking out the numbers and seeing whether they make sense. If anything stands out that I need to make decisions on, I go and talk to my team. We might say we need to improve the ads here, look at where those links are coming from, or change some of the pages because we’re getting a lot of traffic but it’s not converting. Or we’re not getting enough product page views, or the add to cart isn’t working. I use this data to help me make decisions on how I’m going to steer my business, so Google Analytics is a really useful tool if you can get to know the numbers, understand your store and work your way through it.

Subscribe and Work With Me

If you’d like help putting this into practice, I work with aspiring e-commerce entrepreneurs to help them grow their stores in a program called the E-commerce Boot Camp.