Fix pay.shopify.com in Google Analytics Referral Sources
Fix attribution reporting in GA where pay.shopify.com is stealing last-click revenue attribution.
Brad Redding
Brad Redding is the Founder & CEO of Elevar. Specializing in analytics, tracking, GTM, and conversion optimization.
You may have already seen the cool payment feature on your Shopify store that expedites the checkout process for returning visitors offering them a text message prompt to complete their billing and saved shipping information:
But something that is not outlined is that you should be sure pay.shopify.com is excluded from your referral sources so it doesn’t show up as it’s own referral source like this:
Why is This Happening?
The user is losing their original traffic source after entering the text message code in the pay.shopify.com modal => which then updates their information in the checkout.
So their transaction results in pay.shopify.com now showing up as direct referral source during this checkout process.
You can also see this in your top conversion path report (note pay.shopify.com is always the last touchpoint!):
How to Fix pay.shopify.com Referral
Go to Google Analytics > Admin > Property > Tracking Info > Referral Exclusion List > Add a new referral exclusion for shopify.com
That’s it!
This will remove pay.shopify.com from your referral sources for all data moving forward and your proper channel will begin reporting last-click revenue.
Have any questions or issues? Let us know in the chat!
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This was a great article! As I iron down my analytics reporting accuracy, this would have taken forever to isolate! I had added checkout.shopify.com but not just the source URL. Thanks!
Great! But how do you identify your abandon cart email conversions?
Since sometimes users may be referred by Shopify in other ways, is it more effective if we exclude the subdomain pay.shopify.com? Will that work?
Hi Brad, this is great. Does it work for paypal.com as well?
Thank you, Sue! Yep you can add paypal.com to referral exclusion list as well.
Brad, perfect. Do you know of a way to identify the original attribution of sales already attributed to pay.shopify.com?
Nice Article
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