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Accounting for discrepancies in legacy Analytics data

We updated our Shopify Analytics framework in October 2024, which means that if you have copies of reports from before then, you might notice that some information has been updated, including how some data is displayed and adjustments to some report names. The information in this page covers what changes to your data you can expect in Shopify Analytics moving forward as of October 2024.

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Limitations of the current Analytics

Historical data for sessions-based metrics go back only to October 1, 2022. Data prior to that date isn't available for sessions-based metrics. The following metrics have been impacted:

  • Add to cart rate
  • Bounce rate
  • Bounces
  • Checkout conversion rate
  • Completed checkout rate
  • Conversion rate (online store)
  • Online store visitors
  • Pageviews
  • Pageviews per session
  • Reached checkout rate
  • Session duration
  • Sessions
  • Sessions that completed checkout
  • Sessions that reached checkout
  • Sessions with cart additions

Historical data for inventory-based metrics go back only to October 1, 2023. Data prior to that date isn't available for inventory-based metrics.

Changes to the way data is displayed

There have been some general changes to the way some key data displays in the current Shopify Analytics:

  • The previous analytics default to using a product's title, variant title, SKU, and vendor at the time of sale. The current Analytics default to using a product's current title, variant title, SKU, and vendor. This can lead to some apparent discrepancies between previous and new reports that are broken down by these dimensions, especially when looking at older historical data. Consider using the new Product title at time of sale field when you want to compare some data from the previous analytics experience for a closer match. Finance reports continue to use the Product title at time of sale and Product variant title at time of sale.
  • In the current Analytics, percentage change and trend indicators are based on like-for-like data comparisons. For example, if you compare the Net sales metric for the current month to the previous month, then the percentage change is calculated based on the Net sales metric up to the current second compared to the same second in the previous month. This means that when comparing non-like-for-like date ranges, the percentage change and trend indicators might be different from the previous analytics. This is most noticeable when looking at date ranges such as year/quarter/month/week to date (compared to the previous year), and today (compared to yesterday).

Changes to some events and metrics

With the current Shopify Analytics, we've improved our data platform to offer better, more reliable data. As a result, we've changed the way we track the following events:

In the current Analytics, metrics derived from these events will reflect these changes. This update results in more accurate reporting in the default Shopify reports and any new data explorations that you create using these metrics.

The following metrics are impacted:

  • Add to cart rate
  • Bounce rate
  • Bounces
  • Checkout conversion rate
  • Completed checkout rate
  • Conversion rate (online store)
  • Online store visitors
  • Pageviews
  • Pageviews per session
  • Reached checkout rate
  • Session duration
  • Sessions
  • Sessions that completed checkout
  • Sessions that reached checkout
  • Sessions with cart additions

Any reports and dashboards containing these metrics might reflect shifts in data around the time we launched the current Analytics platform in October 2024.

Changes to how we count when a checkout has started

We've made changes to how we count when a customer has reached checkout. This new, improved methodology allows us to measure more consistently across all shops. We've backfilled your data using this new methodology to October 2022 to give you a stable baseline for historical comparison.

Previously, we counted a customer as reaching checkout when they took an action in the checkout, such as proceeding to the next page, or entering a discount code or gift card. We require these input actions in order to give you clean reliable data that filters out bot activity. Our new methodology has expanded the signals we use to filter out bot activity, and will count the total number of sessions where the checkout started loading through one of the following pathways:

  • the storefront cart
  • a checkout permalink
  • shared checkout web URL
  • cart checkout URL
  • the cart API
  • the checkout API (now deprecated and isn't available as of April 1, 2025)

This count includes only sessions in which your customer consented to cookies and isn't using ad blockers. It doesn't include draft order invoices, order edit invoices, exchanges, or transactions made through Shopify POS.

The new methodology is more comprehensive than the previous one, meaning that it may count a higher number of checkout_started events. The following metrics are calculated using this event, and may shift as a result of this change:

  • Checkout conversion rate (may go down)
  • Reached checkout rate (may go up)
  • Sessions that reached checkout (may go up)