Shopify: What Solutions Are Available for Customized Tracking on Your Site?

Shopify: A Powerful and Accessible SaaS E-commerce Platform

Shopify is a popular SaaS (Software as a Service) solution known for its simplicity and accessibility. It enables businesses to easily create and manage their online stores, offering comprehensive tools to:

• Design a website
• Manage inventory
• Process payments
• Track orders

Thanks to its rich ecosystem of applications, Shopify provides numerous features for e-commerce merchants, regardless of their technical expertise. However, recent restrictions related to checkout pages have made implementing customized tracking more challenging.

The Importance of Customized Tracking for E-commerce Businesses

Custom e-commerce tracking is essential for accurate attribution of media campaigns and precise performance analysis. Without complete control over attribution and data quality shared with media partners, advertising investments lose effectiveness, directly impacting the growth of your site's revenue.

Customized tracking enables:

• Control over data sent to platforms like Meta, Pinterest, Google Ads, Google Analytics 4, etc.
• Proper attribution of conversions to ad campaigns.
• Transmission of qualitative user and product data to your analytics tools and media partners.
• Migration from traditional tracking to server-side tracking, improving web performance, governance, and data quality.

Before exploring possible solutions for setting up personalized tracking on your site, it's crucial to understand the unique challenges posed by Shopify, especially concerning restrictions on checkout and order confirmation pages.

A Specific Challenge on Shopify: Restrictions on Checkout and Order Confirmation Pages

On a Shopify site, there are three types of pages:

1. Store pages: Including the homepage, product pages, customer account pages, and cart pages.
2. Checkout pages: Where users complete their purchase by entering information like email, address, and payment method.
3. Order confirmation page: Displayed after a purchase is confirmed.

What has changed:

• Previously: Editing your site's theme through Shopify's back office allowed tracking on all three page types—store, checkout, and confirmation pages. Custom Javascript or modified scripts could personalize tracking on the checkout and confirmation stages.
• Now: With Checkout Extensibility, Shopify enforces a secure environment where only Custom Pixels can track interactions on payment pages. Adding custom code to manage tracking on checkout pages is no longer allowed.
• Starting August 2025: Checkout and confirmation page files enabling dedicated tracking will be phased out permanently.

This shift makes implementing personalized tracking more technically demanding.

Three Options for Tracking Your Shopify Site: Pros and Cons

Here’s a review of three existing solutions to track events across store, checkout, and confirmation pages.

Option 1: The Shopify "Google & YouTube" App

This app simplifies integration with Google's advertising and product listing ecosystems, making these channels easily accessible for Shopify merchants.

Pros

Automatic synchronization: Keeps your Shopify product catalog updated on Google platforms, including the Google Merchant Center.

1. Automatic synchronization: Keeps your Shopify product catalog updated on Google platforms, including the Google Merchant Center.
2. Simplified connection: Direct linking between Google Ads accounts and Shopify stores, enabling seamless ad campaign management.
3. Streamlined tracking: Simplified implementation of conversion tracking for purchases, clicks, and other key actions via Google Ads or GA4.

Cons (Tracking-specific)

1. No tracking customization: Events sent by default cannot be modified, as the app lacks customization options.
2. Google exclusivity: Conversions cannot be shared with platforms outside the Google ecosystem.
3. Consent management: The app doesn’t offer manual user consent management features.
4. No server-side tracking: It does not support server-side tracking integration.

Option 2: Custom Pixel

Custom pixels allow you to subscribe to Shopify’s standard events, corresponding to user journey interactions (e.g., product views, cart additions, purchases). These events can then be shared with third parties by:

• Creating a datalayer (usable with Google Tag Manager).
• Directly sending data to partners.

This advanced option lets you regain control over tracking, especially when integrated with a TMS like Google Tag Manager.

Pros

1. Accessible to all merchants: Even Shopify merchants not using Shopify Plus can implement this advanced tracking.
2. Enhanced security: Custom Pixels operate in a sandboxed environment, preventing unauthorized script injections and reducing data leakage risks.
3. Advanced tracking customization is possible.

Cons

1. No DOM access: Interacting with page elements (DOM) isn’t allowed, complicating GTM triggers like clicks or scrolls.
2. Incompatibility with GTM Preview mode: Events don’t appear in GTM’s preview environment, requiring advanced debugging skills.
3. No automatic cookie transmission: Managing Client IDs and attribution becomes more complex.
4. Technical expertise required: Implementation demands advanced tracking skills.

Option 3: Addingwell Plugin - A Turnkey Solution for Effortless Tracking

Our Addingwell plugin simplifies tracking under Shopify’s current and future standards. By leveraging custom pixels for checkout and dedicated code for store page events, it ensures optimal tracking with minimal effort.

Setting it up is simple: you need our plugin and a Google Tag Manager Web container.

Pros

1. Easy GTM snippet installation via the plugin across all site pages.
2. Advanced e-commerce tracking implemented effortlessly, covering store and checkout pages in one click. The plugin populates all major e-commerce events in a datalayer, formatted for GA4.
3. Qualitative user data included in the datalayer for media partners.
4. Pre-configured GTM client-side container available for download, enabling quick and efficient setup.
5. For server-side Addingwell clients: Adblocker bypassing ,improving data capture by up to 15%.
6. For server-side Addingwell clients: cookie retention simplified.
7. Free plugin installation, requiring no advanced technical knowledge.

Cons

1. Currently, the plugin doesn’t support adding custom events beyond its pre-defined e-commerce events.

Ready to install our plugin? Learn how to set it up step-by-step in our next chapter