Google analytics and Shopify: Don't forget to exclude referrer domains!

When setting up your Shopify store it's really important to install Google analytics so you can see exactly how your visitors are interacting with your pages. I'm a bit of a data geek (understatement 1 for this post) so analytics is the first port of call when we start working with a new client to optimise their store.

So, I log in to analytics and go straight for the reports to check some of the high-level insights like where are our conversions (sales) coming from; what's the conversion rate for return visitors; is the newsletter bringing more sales than Google Adwords or is Facebook driving more sales than Pinterest.

One issue I'm seeing quite regularly is the client hasn't excluded referral domains in analytics so these vital insights just aren't available. It's a simple oversight to make and a simple issue to fix.

Here's the instructions from Shopify covering how to exclude referral domains in Shopify (you basically exclude your Shopify domain, primary domain and any payment gateway domains).

https://docs.shopify.com/manual/settings/general/google-analytics#exclude-referrer-domains

If you need help setting up Google analytics in your web store contact us for help.