Does Engagement Lead to Sales? How to Measure Brand Marketing Effectiveness on Shopify
This article introduces how to measure whether engagement-boosting initiatives on your Shopify store are translating into sales.
Previously, when running an owned media channel on Shopify, we introduced a method for measuring how far articles are being read.
Engagement-boosting initiatives like running owned media are often said to be difficult to evaluate because they rarely lead to short-term sales.
By using Google Tag Manager and Mixpanel, you can measure whether engagement-boosting initiatives carried out within your Shopify store have led to sales over the long term.
In this article, we'll show you how to measure whether customers who read your brand concept page all the way through actually come back and make a purchase later.
StoreHero leverages its proprietary growth platform to support business growth through fine-grained operations that manual work alone cannot achieve, and through the large-scale execution of growth initiatives.
If you're struggling to increase sales on Shopify, feel free to reach out. =>Download our free service overview here
Setting Up Google Tag Manager and Mixpanel Accounts
First, if you don't already have a Google Tag Manager or Mixpanel account, go ahead and create them. A free Mixpanel account is perfectly fine to start with.
Setting Up Google Tag Manager on Shopify
Next, set up your Google Tag Manager snippet in Shopify.As explained in a previous article, you need to place the Google Tag Manager snippet inside both the head tag and the body tag. Just like last time, we'll add it directly to the theme code.
Go to Online Store > Themes > Actions > Edit Code.
Open the theme.liquid file in the Layout folder — it contains both the head and body tags — and place the Google Tag Manager snippets inside each one accordingly.
In the diagram, the head snippet is placed just before the closing head tag, but note that Google recommends placing it as high up in the head section as possible.
Additionally, since we want to analyze whether customers who took an engagement action later made a purchase, we'll also place the tag on the order confirmation page.
On Shopify, unless you're on Shopify Plus, you generally cannot place tags on the checkout page itself — but you can place them on the order confirmation (thank you) page.
Go to Settings > Checkout.
Under the Order Processing section, you'll find an Additional Scripts field. Paste both the Google Tag Manager head snippet and body snippet together there.
This places the Google Tag Manager snippet inside the body of the order confirmation page. While this isn't Google's recommended configuration, it's the approach we use within Shopify's constraints.
Adding the Mixpanel Snippet to Shopify
Next, we'll add the Mixpanel snippet to Shopify. Since Google Tag Manager is already set up, this part is straightforward.When you create your Mixpanel account, you'll be shown the Mixpanel JavaScript library — copy it.
Then, go to the Tags menu in Google Tag Manager and create a new tag.
Set the tag type to Custom HTML, and paste the Mixpanel JavaScript you just copied into the HTML field.
This tag should fire on all pages you want to track with Mixpanel. For this setup, we selected All Pages as the trigger.
Setting Up Engagement Action Tracking
Next, we'll walk through how to track customer engagement actions within your Shopify store.For this example, we'll track "reading the brand concept page all the way through" as the engagement action to measure.
Setting Up the Brand Concept Page Read-Through Tag
For a detailed explanation of how to configure a page read-through event in Google Tag Manager, please refer to the previous article. Here we'll cover it briefly.In the Google Tag Manager workspace, go to the Tags menu and click New.
Set the tag type to Custom HTML and paste the following Mixpanel snippet into the HTML field. The "Brand Concept Page" part is the event name — feel free to use any name you like.
<script type="text/javascript">
mixpanel.track(
"Brand Concept Page",
{ "url": location.href }
);
</script>
The "url": location.href part sends information to Mixpanel about which page triggered this event. Mixpanel can handle many other types of data as well — check the official documentation for details.
Under Advanced Settings, set the Tag firing options to Once per event.
Setting Up the Brand Concept Page Read-Through Trigger
For this analysis, we'll define "reading the brand concept page" as "scrolling 80% of the brand concept page" and configure the trigger accordingly.Under trigger types, select Scroll Depth.
In the trigger configuration, check Vertical Scroll Depths as Percentages and enter 80. This will fire the trigger when the user has scrolled 80% of the page.
To limit the trigger to the concept page only, check Some Pages for the trigger firing condition and filter by Page URL containing "/concept/" (or similar).
With this, you can now track whether customers have viewed the brand concept page on your Shopify store.
Setting Up the Conversion Tag
Now let's also set up tracking for conversions.Just as before, go to the Tags menu in Google Tag Manager and click New.
Set the tag type to Custom HTML and paste the following snippet into the HTML field. The "Conversion" part is the event name — feel free to use any name you prefer.
<script type="text/javascript">
mixpanel.track(
"Conversion",
{ "url": location.href }
);
<script>
After pasting the snippet, it should look something like this.
For the trigger, set the trigger type to Page View, and configure it to fire when the Page URL contains "thank_you" — or whatever URL pattern corresponds to your order confirmation page.
The setup is now complete — save and publish your tags.
※ We recommend previewing and verifying everything before publishing.
Purchase Rate After Engagement Actions
Now let's analyze whether customers who read the brand concept page all the way through actually went on to make a purchase.Mixpanel has many features, but for this analysis, open the Analysis > Retention screen. Set A to the event name for reading the brand concept page (in our case, "Brand Concept Page") and B to the event name for a completed purchase ("Conversion").
The report will then show — both as percentages and absolute numbers — how many days after action A customers performed action B.
You can also compare the purchase rate of customers who took an engagement action versus those who didn't. As more data accumulates over time, you'll be able to extend the analysis window accordingly.
In this example, we used reading the concept page as the engagement action, but the same method can be used to visualize and compare the effectiveness of other initiatives, such as:
- Subscribing to a newsletter.
- Completing a quiz.
- Submitting a product review.
- Visiting via a QR code distributed at a physical store.
Until now, it's been difficult to see the impact of engagement-boosting initiatives — but with this approach, you can visualize results easily.
Building a Monitoring and Measurement Environment with StoreHero
StoreHero supports merchants who are looking to grow sales on Shopify by helping them execute growth initiatives thoroughly and consistently.When it comes to monitoring and measurement, we leverage the StoreHero growth platform to aggregate data from Shopify, various apps, Google Analytics, advertising platforms, and more — building dashboards and configuring the event tracking needed for analysis, providing a comprehensive monitoring and measurement environment that would otherwise be difficult to implement.
We are currently offering free store diagnostics. If you have challenges with building a measurement environment or executing growth initiatives in general, please don't hesitate to reach out. Learn more about our free store diagnostics here
Summary
We've introduced a method for measuring the effectiveness of engagement-boosting initiatives on your Shopify store.Shopify is a commerce platform that enables you to execute a wide range of initiatives quickly. Precisely because you can roll out initiatives one after another, measuring their effectiveness is crucial.
Brand marketing initiatives aimed at long-term growth are often considered difficult to evaluate — but with Mixpanel and Google Tag Manager, you can measure the impact of brand marketing efforts carried out within your Shopify store.
We hope you'll make use of this approach when running brand marketing on Shopify.
Also, if there are topics related to Shopify you'd like us to cover in future articles, please let us know in the comments section below.