First: set up GA4 properly on Shopify (5 minutes)
Shopify shipped a native GA4 integration in 2023, so installation is now a one-field setting — no Google Tag Manager required for most stores. To set it up:
- Create a GA4 property at analytics.google.com if you don't have one. Copy the measurement ID (starts with G-).
- In your Shopify admin, go to Online Store → Preferences → Google Analytics → Set up Google. Paste the G- measurement ID.
- Enable 'Use enhanced ecommerce' — this is the box that makes purchase tracking work automatically.
- Wait 24-48 hours, then place a test order to verify conversions appear in GA4 → Reports → Realtime.
If you're using a third-party Shopify theme, the tracking should work without changes — Shopify's enhanced ecommerce integration fires the standard GA4 ecommerce events (`view_item`, `add_to_cart`, `begin_checkout`, `purchase`) regardless of theme.
Report #1: Reports → Acquisition → Traffic acquisition
The single most important report for any Shopify store. Shows you where your buyers came from — Organic Search, Direct, Social, Referral, Email, Paid Search — and how much revenue each channel drove.
What to look for: which channel is driving the most revenue, and which channel has the best session conversion rate (revenue per session, or % of sessions that became purchases). A channel sending 5,000 sessions/month at a 0.5% conversion rate is doing less for you than a channel sending 1,000 sessions at 4% — even though the first one looks bigger by traffic.
Report #2: Reports → Engagement → Pages and screens
Your product pages, collection pages, and landing pages, ranked by traffic and engagement. This is where you find the page-level winners and losers.
What to look for: a product page with high traffic but low add-to-cart rate is a copy or photography problem. A product page with high add-to-cart but low purchase rate is a checkout, shipping, or trust problem. Sort by sessions to find your high-traffic pages first, then drill into each.
Report #3: Reports → Monetization → Ecommerce purchases
The product-level revenue report — every SKU sold, in order of revenue. Vital for inventory and marketing decisions.
What to look for: which products are pulling the most revenue this month vs last month? Which products got a big spike from a single campaign and would benefit from a follow-up promotion? Which products with high page views have low purchase counts (worth a copy or pricing review)?
Report #4: Reports → Monetization → Purchase journey
The funnel report — what % of visitors view a product, add to cart, begin checkout, and complete a purchase. This is the most actionable single report in GA4 for ecommerce.
What to look for: the biggest drop-off step. If 100% view a product, 35% add to cart, 18% begin checkout, but only 6% complete purchase — your checkout itself is leaking money. If 100% view, 12% add to cart, 11% begin checkout, 10% complete — your product pages are the bottleneck. Each store has its own pattern; the diagnosis is wherever the biggest single-step drop happens.
Report #5: Reports → Engagement → Landing page
Lists every URL someone first landed on, ranked by sessions. Critical for SEO and paid-ads decisions.
What to look for: landing pages with high sessions and low conversion rate are SEO winners (you're getting traffic) with conversion-rate problems (you're not converting it). The fix is usually one of: better headline, clearer hero image, lower-friction CTA, or trust signals (reviews, guarantees). For paid landing pages, the same logic applies — high sessions but low conversion rate means your traffic is fine but your offer/page needs work.
The Shopify-specific gotchas
Three things commonly trip up Shopify owners reading GA4 for the first time:
- Revenue in GA4 won't exactly match Shopify Admin. GA4 only counts orders from sessions where its tracking fired. Adblockers, slow-loading pages, and consent rejections cause some orders to go untracked. A 5-15% gap between GA4 revenue and Shopify revenue is normal — anything bigger means a tracking issue worth investigating.
- Shopify checkout used to live on a different domain. Pre-2023 Shopify stores had their checkout on `checkout.shopify.com`, which broke session continuity. Shopify migrated to single-domain checkout in late 2023 — if you're still on the old setup, conversions in GA4 will look dramatically lower than reality.
- Refunds and cancellations don't subtract automatically. GA4 records the purchase event when the order is placed. If you refund the order, GA4 doesn't deduct that revenue unless you explicitly fire a `refund` event. For most small stores, the simpler fix is to compare GA4 revenue to net Shopify revenue (after refunds) once a month rather than expecting exact matches.
The 5-minute Shopify weekly check
Once a week, in this order, check exactly these:
- Sessions and total revenue (Reports → Reports snapshot)
- Conversion rate by channel (Traffic acquisition → Session conversion rate column)
- Top 5 selling products this week (Ecommerce purchases, sort by revenue)
- Biggest drop-off step in the funnel (Purchase journey)
- Anything unusual? (e.g., one landing page suddenly carrying twice its normal traffic, or one channel dropping by 50%)
Five reports, five minutes, every Monday. That's the entire weekly analytics routine for a Shopify owner doing $10K–$500K/month in revenue.
Or — let Plainly do it for you
Plainly was built to replace exactly this weekly routine. Connect your GA4 once (one-click, read-only). Every Monday morning, you get an email with a plain-English summary of what changed week-over-week, which channel and which products drove the change, and what to do about it. Built specifically for non-marketers running their own businesses — no jargon, no dashboards, no acronyms.
Try the free demo from the homepage and see the kind of weekly summary you'd get for your store.