Tips for Using Event Tracking with Shopify and GA4

In this article, we introduce tips for using event tracking with Shopify and GA4. This should be especially helpful for Shopify merchants who are unsure how to make the most of GA4 event tracking. These insights will help you improve your Shopify store, so please read through to the end.

StoreHero leverages its proprietary growth platform to support detailed operations that manual management simply cannot handle, along with large-scale strategy execution to drive business growth. If you're facing challenges with increasing sales on Shopify, feel free to reach out. =>Download our free service introduction materials here

Standard Shopify and GA4 Integration and Event Publishing via GTM

By using the Google & YouTube channel in Shopify, you can integrate Shopify with Google Analytics. This enables event tracking for actions such as adding items to the cart and completing purchases.

By connecting Google & YouTube with Shopify, most of Google's recommended events can be automatically collected. Event names alone may not make it clear what each event represents, but you can find detailed explanations in the official documentation.

How to View Events in GA4

In GA4, under Engagement > Events, you can see event names such as first_visit and scroll along with their occurrence counts. Honestly, just looking at this data is not enough to drive improvements.

By using Exploration reports to examine the relationship between events and purchase rates, you can identify which events are most likely to lead to a purchase — making the data actionable for store improvements.

For example, if people who add an item to their wishlist have a higher purchase rate than those who simply view reviews, you can focus on encouraging wishlist registrations.

How to Set Up Events

Beyond the standard events available through the Google & YouTube integration, you can also publish custom events. For example, you can track when a user scrolls 50% down a page or clicks the wishlist button.

By measuring these custom events, you can evaluate the performance of features and content implemented in your store.

Google Tag Manager (GTM) is a convenient tool for configuration. You can define what event to publish (event name, event parameters) and when to trigger it (trigger conditions).

※ Detailed configuration instructions will be covered in a future article.

Customizing Events

In addition to the event name, GA4 events support "event parameters" for recording additional information. For example, with a scroll event, you can analyze on which page and how far down the user scrolled.

By adding JavaScript code to your Shopify theme files via GTM and configuring custom dimensions (analysis axes) and custom metrics, you can enrich your event data. Below is an example where an event fires at 25% scroll depth, with the custom dimension scroll_depth_page_path and the custom metric scroll_depth configured.

<script>
     gtag('event', 'scroll', {
        'scroll_depth': 25,
        'scroll_depth_page_path': location.pathname
      });
</script>

After placing this code, configure custom dimensions and custom metrics in GA4 to enable analysis.

Events That Encourage Return Visits

Do you know how many visits it takes before a customer makes a purchase? When analyzed with GA, stores with an average order value of around 10,000 yen tend to see about 50% of buyers completing their purchase on a return visit rather than the first. While events that drive immediate purchases are important, understanding and leveraging events that encourage return visits is equally critical for increasing overall sales.

By aggregating the return visit rate after each event in GA, you can identify how far into the consideration process a visitor needs to get before they are likely to return. A useful tip when reading return visit rate data by event is to compare it against the post-event CVR (conversion rate).

If an event ranks higher in return visit rate than in post-event CVR, it may be particularly effective at driving return visits.

As a general principle, design your store around events with high CVR, while also guiding visitors who don't convert in a single session toward events that are likely to bring them back. This is the key to improving your store's conversion funnel.

Building a Monitoring and Measurement Environment with StoreHero

StoreHero supports merchants who are struggling to grow sales on Shopify by ensuring thorough execution of growth strategies. On the monitoring and measurement front, we leverage the StoreHero growth platform to aggregate data from Shopify, various apps, GA, and advertising platforms into a unified dashboard. We also handle the implementation of event tracking setups that are difficult to configure on your own, providing a complete monitoring and measurement environment.

We are currently offering free store diagnostics. If you have challenges with building your measurement environment or with growth strategies in general, please contact us. => Learn more about our free store diagnostics here

Summary

We hope this article gave you a clear understanding of how to use event tracking with Shopify and GA4. Since we covered specific setup methods, you should be able to put these tips into practice right away.

StoreHero supports business growth through an automated system that combines Shopify with growth strategies. If you'd like to work alongside Shopify and growth experts to accelerate your growth initiatives, feel free to reach out.