The 3 Best Ways to Track Advertising Sales on Shopify

So you’re running advertising, but you don’t know how to track your attributed sales. Today, I’m going to walk you through 3 ways to track your sales without tracking pixels. 

When given an option about tracking, most consumers choose “Ask App not to Track.” In fact, 78% of iOS users opted out. (Morning Brew). So the question is, as marketers who want to attribute sales with advertising, how do we get around this?

Ghost Products

I don’t see this approach used often, but the best way to ensure you are getting results from your advertising campaigns is to duplicate an existing product on your Shopify store – but - keep it off the storefront.

To make any products ghost products, you need to be sure not to list these products under any categories; driving only paid advertising traffic to these specific product pages. By doing this, you can confirm that all sales for this product are coming from your campaigns not from general site visitors. 

 

Unique Coupon Codes

I will admit, this next tip isn’t the easiest process, but it is well worth the work for the ability to track accurately. Creating bulk coupon codes and applying these codes (and only these codes) to your campaigns can drastically increase your ability to track success of your campaigns.

The easiest way is to create a bulk set of coupon codes. You can use apps such as bulk creator (Bulk Creator) to develop them. Then upload these codes to a spreadsheet and start delineating them to specific campaigns running on social media. (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok..etc)

These campaign-specific coupon codes will allow you to track sales via the coupon code usage. Personally, I review these on a bi-weekly basis but depending on your budget you can likely just review monthly.

Downside? This process requires you to provide an offer for every campaign to track sales. To be honest, this has never been too much of an issue given the most important campaigns to track are typically those with offers. (Ex. New Customer Acquisition Campaigns.)

UTM

May seem a bit old school, but UTM Parameters are still a great way to track who is coming to your site and via what campaign. But UTMs allow you to track more than campaigns. You can track what Platform, Campaign, Ad Set, Creative…etc. If created properly, these unique URLs truly help when trying to determine which campaigns have provided you with the most traffic, leads and/or conversions.

There are countless options for creating custom URLs, but the oldest and the best is via google: Google Link Builder

Creating these unique URLs for each ad within your social campaign will allow you to confirm any results seen within the ads manager of the respective platform. Furthermore, you can run Google Analytics reports or use Shopify’s own reporting system to confirm any data quickly and easily. 

And that’s it! Those are the three ways that I track results for every campaign that I run. What’s even more powerful is combining all three and comparing the results! 

So apply these methods to your campaigns and stop relying only on first-party pixels provided by most advertising products!  

See you next week.