Analytics & Tracking

GA4 replaced Universal Analytics in July 2023. If you are still running UA or using an old Shopify GA integration, your data is unreliable. Start fresh: create a GA4 property, install the Google tag via your tag manager or platform settings, and immediately enable Enhanced Ecommerce.

• —Create a GA4 property at analytics.google.com and link it to your store
• —Set up a purchase conversion goal: Admin > Conversions > New Conversion Event > name it 'purchase'
• —Enable the Google Signals feature so you get cross-device data (Admin > Data Settings > Google Signals)
• —Set your data retention to 14 months. The default 2 months means you lose year-over-year comparisons
• —Filter out internal traffic by adding your office IP under Admin > Data Streams > Configure Tag Settings > Define Internal Traffic

GSC gives you data GA4 cannot: which search queries your pages appear for, how often people click, and your average position in results. It is free, and there is no legitimate reason not to have it set up on day one.

• —Go to search.google.com/search-console and add your property
• —Choose Domain property (not URL prefix). It covers all subdomains and both http/https automatically
• —Verify via DNS TXT record if you have hosting access, otherwise use the HTML tag method
• —Submit your sitemap under Sitemaps > Add sitemap (e.g. yourstore.com/sitemap.xml)
• —Link GSC to GA4: in GA4 go to Admin > Product Links > Search Console Links

Most ecommerce stores track too many metrics and act on none of them. Here are the five numbers worth watching regularly. Everything else is noise until you have these under control.

• —Organic sessions: the raw volume of traffic arriving from Google. Track this weekly in GA4 under Acquisition > Traffic Acquisition, filtered to Organic Search.
• —Revenue from organic channel: in GA4, go to Monetisation > Ecommerce Purchases and filter by Organic Search session source. This is the number your CEO cares about.
• —Average position for money keywords: in GSC, use the Search Results report filtered to your 20 most important product and category keywords. Position changes of 2-3 spots on page 1 can shift revenue significantly.
• —CTR by page: in GSC under Pages, sort by impressions. Pages with high impressions and CTR below 2% have weak title tags or meta descriptions. Fix those first.
• —Pages per organic session: in GA4, this signals content depth. If organic visitors land and immediately leave, your landing pages are not matching search intent. A healthy benchmark for ecommerce category pages is 3-4 pages per session.

This is one of the most repeatable SEO wins there is. In GSC, go to Search Results and apply these filters: Impressions > 100 and Average Position between 11 and 20. Sort by impressions descending. What you are looking at are pages sitting on page 2 of Google. They already have some ranking authority, and a targeted content improvement often pushes them to page 1 within 4-8 weeks.

• —Filter GSC Search Results: click '+' > Impressions > Greater than > 100
• —Add second filter: Position > Greater than > 10, and Position < Less than > 21
• —Sort the table by Impressions descending
• —Click any URL to see the specific queries driving impressions for that page
• —Open the URL in another tab and compare your content against the top 3 ranking pages for those queries
• —Update content, strengthen the title tag, and resubmit in URL Inspection

The stores that make consistent SEO progress are the ones that check their numbers on a fixed schedule, not when something feels wrong. Here is a simple cadence that works in practice. It takes about 30 minutes a week and 90 minutes a month.