Customer and session discrepancies in Shopify Analytics

Shopify Analytics offers insight into unique customer and session counts, but various factors can lead to differences in the numbers displayed across reports. This page outlines the reasons for these discrepancies, such as how unique visitors and customers are counted, and the effect of analytics cookies and privacy preferences on your data.

Visitor and Customer number discrepancies

Some reports include a Visitors or Customers column to display how many unique people are connected to a particular action or trait. The total given is an approximation.

Some reports, such as Sessions over time or Total sales over time, can have a visitor or customer counted on multiple rows. For example, a customer might visit your store on one day, and then visit it again a few days later. This results in the rows for both days each displaying a value of 1. Because both visitor numbers came from a single person, the total value is also displayed as 1, instead of adding them together for 2. In contrast, the Sessions column displays that the website was visited twice.

In this example, the Visitors and Customers columns are displayed for a shop over a 3 month period. When the totals of columns with counts of unique people are displayed in reports, the resulting total might be higher or lower than the sum of the individual rows.

Comparing sessions and visitors

The number of sessions and the number of visitors are based on cookies. Cookies are small files that are stored on a visitor's device, such as a desktop or smartphone, when they visit your online store. One cookie identifies the device (the visitor). Another cookie keeps track of the length of the session.

A session ends after 30 minutes of no activity, and at midnight UTC. Because the same visitor can have multiple sessions, the number of sessions is usually higher than the number of visitors.

Example: A user views products on your store for 20 minutes, then returns to your store 2 hours later for another 10 minutes. Two sessions and one visitor are reported. If the user instead views your store for 5 minutes, leaves, and returns 10 minutes later, then one session and one visitor are reported.

If you want to view your online store and not have it count as a session in your acquisition reports, then on your desktop Shopify admin, click View store to open your store in a new browser tab. Any other method of viewing your online store on desktop counts as a session in your reports.

If you view your online store from the Shopify app on iPhone or Android, then it counts as a session in your acquisition reports.

Impact of cookie-based customer data collection and analytics

Cookies play a crucial role in collecting and reporting analytics for your online store by storing small text files on a user's device as they browse. These cookies are processed and stored by the web browser, enabling the collection of valuable insights into user behavior on your website, such as session counts, page visits, and link clicks.

Cookies can potentially contain enough information to identify a user, and various laws and regulations worldwide govern the collection and usage of this information. Notably, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the ePrivacy Directive outline specific guidelines for merchants operating in or with customers from the European Economic Area (EEA) and the United Kingdom (UK), dictating how visitor data should be respected and collected.

If you're a merchant operating in the EEA or the UK, then you might have already encountered this topic and made the necessary adjustments to your customer privacy settings. When a cookie banner is active in specific regions, data is collected from visitors from those regions only after obtaining consent. Consequently, there might be a reduction in the amount of data available for analytics, marketing, and personalization purposes. This can be observed through decreased session counts and other metrics that rely on session data, including conversion rates.

This data discrepancy typically occurs due to the user not consenting to their data being collected, and can occur when your store uses either Shopify's cookie banner or a third-party privacy app that uses the Customer Privacy API.

To learn more about effectively managing your cookie settings, refer to the documentation on managing your customer privacy settings.

Customers over time report and total number of customers discrepancies

The Customers over time report displays only the number of customers that have placed an order on your store. The total number in your Customers list includes customers that haven't placed an order on your store. For example, your Customers list include customers that signed up for email marketing.

You can create a customer segment that filters based on customers that placed orders. Use the following segmentation to do this: orders_placed(since: <YYYY-MM-DD>) = true AND orders_placed(until: <YYYY-MM-DD>) = true. Replace YYYY-MM-DD with the date range that you want. If you want to get the total number of customers from when your store was opened until the date you're creating the segment, then use the date you opened in for the since date and today's date for the until date.

Sessions converted and number of orders discrepancies

If you notice a discrepancy with the number of converted sessions in your Sessions reports being lower than the number of orders you have for your online store, then this might be a result of customers making more than one purchase in a single session.

For example, a customer might make multiple separate purchases in a single session on your website, which results in multiple orders being recorded, but it's counted as only one conversion.

Conversions are based on the last click attribution model and attributed to where the conversion happened, not necessarily the initial marketing referral. If a customer visits through a marketing link but leaves and converts in a later session by visiting the site with a direct link, then the conversion is attributed to the latest session and displayed as Direct. If you created the UTM tracking on an external platform, such as Google, or set up a campaign on Facebook, then you might have a session converted there and notice a discrepancy with your Shopify reports. You can review the Conversion details on the order and both session details are displayed.