9 Google Analytics Settings You Should Configure When Using It for Shopify Growth

Shopify's dashboard and reports provide the data you need to run your commerce operations, but if you want to execute growth strategies effectively, Google Analytics can be a powerful tool in your arsenal.

However, when actively using Google Analytics, it's common to forget what settings were configured, lose access to the person who set things up, or find that critical settings can be edited by people outside the organization.

Creating a Google Analytics settings management sheet can help you avoid configuration chaos. In this article, we introduce the Google Analytics settings you'll want to organize when implementing growth strategies on Shopify.

StoreHero leverages its proprietary growth platform to support detailed operations that would be impossible to manage manually, and to drive business growth through large-scale strategy execution.
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Google Analytics Settings Management Sheet

We recommend organizing your Google Analytics settings in a management sheet before they grow out of control. We've linked an example sheet below. Even a simple layout like this is sufficient — create your management sheet before your settings start to accumulate.

Google Analytics Settings Management Sheet Example

Below, we'll walk through the settings you should manage, following the structure of this example sheet.

User Permissions

Google Analytics user permissions can be configured at the account level, property level, and view level. By tracking who has which permissions at which level in a spreadsheet, you can quickly understand who can handle what kinds of configuration requests.

Property and View Settings

You can create multiple properties and views, and by configuring each differently, you can view data tailored to specific purposes. The key thing to watch out for is that different property or view settings can result in the same metric name representing entirely different data.

For example, session timeout, referral exclusion settings, and channel grouping configurations can all cause significant differences in your data. Keep a record of what settings are applied to each property and view in your management sheet.

Goals

Shopify makes it easy to set up Google Analytics enhanced e-commerce tracking, so you'll have no trouble measuring common e-commerce events and conversions such as product page views, add-to-cart, checkout initiation, and purchase completion.

However, when running growth strategies on Shopify, you'll often want to track additional events and conversions as goals. For example, you might set goals for newsletter sign-ups, scroll depth on pages or articles, or clicks on specific links, and then measure the performance of traffic sources and landing pages.

When multiple people use Google Analytics, it's easy to accidentally create duplicate goals, leading to confusion. To avoid this, keep your goal configurations organized.

Events

Event configurations tend to cause even more confusion than goals. Document what values should appear for event category, event action, event label, and event value for each user action. Keeping this organized makes events easier to analyze and simplifies the process of adding new ones.

UTM Parameters

UTM parameters are URL parameters used in Google Analytics to track marketing campaigns and acquisition strategies. The most commonly used ones are utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, utm_term, and utm_content. Just documenting how these are being used will help you avoid confusion. Also note that email delivery apps and similar tools sometimes set their own UTM parameters automatically — make sure to reflect these in your management sheet as well.

On the other hand, we sometimes see Google Analytics setups where UTM parameters are not configured at all. Without UTM parameters, you cannot measure the performance of individual traffic sources in detail, so if you're focused on growth strategies, make sure to take advantage of UTM parameters.

Content Groups

It's also worth organizing your content groups. As long as you're using an official Shopify theme, the directory structure for collection pages, product detail pages, and blog pages is consistent, so you can often perform the same analysis using URL searches in Google Analytics without content groups. However, for cases where URL rules alone make classification difficult — such as grouping specific products into a product detail page group — content groups can be very effective.

If you plan to create many content groups for detailed content analysis, it's a good idea to prepare a dedicated organization sheet for your content groups as well.

Audiences

If you're using Google Ads, you're likely also making use of Google Analytics audiences. With audiences, you can go beyond simply retargeting all store visitors — you can create audience segments based on conditions such as users who added a product to their cart, users who came from a specific traffic source, or users who viewed a particular product detail page, and then use these for targeting in Google Ads.

Audiences are extremely useful, but they tend to multiply quickly once you start using them, so keep them organized.

Filters

Filters are used to exclude traffic from your own employees or partner companies, ensuring accurate tracking data. Since Google Analytics settings often differ between test stores and production stores, forgetting what filters are in place can cause confusion during testing. Organize your filter configurations to avoid unnecessary mix-ups.

Segments

Segments are similar to audiences, but rather than being used in Google Ads, they are used for analysis within Google Analytics itself. You can analyze characteristics of users who viewed a specific product page or added a product to their cart compared to other users.

Segments are convenient, but like audiences, they tend to grow in number once you start using them, so keep track of what configurations you have in place.

Note that segments are private by default and can only be used by you unless shared. Use "Asset sharing" to share them with other Google Analytics team members.

Building a Monitoring and Measurement Environment with StoreHero

StoreHero supports Shopify merchants who are working to grow their sales by providing thorough execution of growth strategies.

For monitoring and measurement as well, we leverage our growth platform StoreHero to provide dashboard creation that aggregates data from Shopify, various apps, GA, advertising platforms, and more — along with event configuration needed for analysis — delivering a 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 with growth strategies in general, please get in touch. Learn more about our free store diagnostics here

Summary

In this article, we introduced the Google Analytics settings you'll want to organize when using it for growth purposes on Shopify. When running growth strategies, your Google Analytics configurations tend to multiply quickly, so we recommend setting up a management sheet like the one introduced here before your setup becomes too complex to manage.