The Ecomm Analyst

I see a lot of frustration with GA4. Some of it is fair. Most of it is misdirected.

GA4 isn’t broken. It’s a general-purpose analytics platform built for a wide range of use cases, and e-commerce is one of many. When people complain that GA4 doesn’t show them what they need, they’re usually comparing it to what Universal Analytics used to do for them with a lot of custom work, and forgetting the custom work part.

Where GA4 actually falls short for most Shopify stores.

The interface assumes you know what you’re looking for. Exploration reports are powerful and unusable in roughly equal measure. Most operators don’t have the patience or the analyst time to build out the custom reports needed to get useful e-commerce views.

Attribution is opaque and changes when you blink. Data-driven attribution in GA4 is a black box. The numbers move based on Google’s models, which Google doesn’t fully document, and you can’t easily reconcile what you’re seeing against other sources.

The data shape doesn’t match how Shopify operators think. GA4 thinks in sessions and events. Shopify operators think in orders and customers. The translation layer between those two costs you time and produces results you still have to interpret.

This is why most of the operators I work with end up using GA4 as a secondary tool. It’s good for site behavior, content performance, and broad trends. It’s not where they make the call on what’s working.

What I run alongside it. Shopify native reports for order-level truth, Klaviyo for email-specific behavior, and ThoughtMetric as the attribution layer that ties channels together with consistent rules. ThoughtMetric is built around e-commerce, so the questions it answers are the questions you actually have. ROAS by channel applied the same way across the board. New vs returning customer breakdown by source. LTV by acquisition channel.

GA4 stays installed because you’ll want it for the occasional deep dive and because future you will be glad the data exists. But it doesn’t have to be the tool you open first in the morning, and for most Shopify operators, it shouldn’t be.