Your Shopify Checkout is Stealing Credit from Your Best Campaigns

UTMGuard Team
2 min readplatform-guides

You check your GA4 landing page report. Something's wrong. 40% of your purchases are attributed to "checkout.shopify.com / referral" instead of your Facebook ads, Google campaigns, or email sequences.

Your best campaigns look like failures. Your actual winners are invisible.

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Why this happens

Shopify uses a separate checkout domain (checkout.shopify.com). When customers proceed to checkout, GA4 treats it as a new session. The original landing page loses all credit. Your $5,000 Facebook campaign that drove the sale? GA4 thinks the checkout page did it.

😰 Is this your only tracking issue?

This is just 1 of 40+ ways UTM tracking breaks. Most marketing teams have 8-12 critical issues they don't know about.

• 94% of sites have UTM errors

• Average: $8,400/month in wasted ad spend

• Fix time: 15 minutes with our report

✓ Connects directly to GA4 (read-only, secure)

✓ Scans 90 days of data in 2 minutes

✓ Prioritizes issues by revenue impact

✓ Shows exact sessions affected

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The 3-minute fix

This uses GA4's cross-domain measurement to maintain session continuity across Shopify's checkout domain.

Step 1: In GA4, go to Admin → Data Streams → Web → Configure tag settings → Configure your domains

Add these three domains:

  • yourstore.com
  • yourstore.myshopify.com
  • checkout.shopify.com

Step 2: Same location → List unwanted referrals

Add:

  • checkout.shopify.com
  • yourstore.myshopify.com

Step 3: Test with a real purchase. Check GA4 real-time report. Your original landing page should now get credit.

What you'll see

Checkout URLs disappear from landing page reports. Purchases correctly attributed to Facebook, Google, email—wherever they actually came from. You finally see which campaigns drive real revenue.

✅ Fixed this issue? Great! Now check the other 39...

You just fixed one tracking issue. But are your Google Ads doubling sessions? Is Facebook attribution broken? Are internal links overwriting campaigns?

Connects to GA4 (read-only, OAuth secured)

Scans 90 days of traffic in 2 minutes

Prioritizes by revenue impact

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FAQ

Will this fix historical data?

No, only future tracking. But new purchases will show accurate attribution immediately.

Do I need Shopify Plus?

No. This works for all Shopify plans.

What about Shop Pay?

Covered by the checkout.shopify.com domain configuration.

How do I verify it's working?

Make a test purchase from a UTM-tagged URL. Check GA4 to confirm the original landing page gets credit, not the checkout URL.