Which video sold it? What Shopify Analytics can and cannot tell you

Shopify can tell you a shopper arrived from TikTok. It cannot tell you which video they watched on your store, or whether watching it had anything to do with the order.

That is not a gap in your setup. It is what the reports measure. Shopify's marketing reports attribute sales to the referrer, which its own documentation defines as the method that a customer uses to get to your store. First click and last click both hand the credit to a channel. Neither model looks at anything the shopper did after they landed.

So the moment you put video on a product page you have a question the reports cannot reach. The referrer was settled before the video played, and the traffic was already yours.

What has to happen to answer it

Every app in this category has to assemble the same three pieces.

One is an event when the video is watched or clicked. Only the widget can produce it, since nothing else on the page knows a video is there.

Another is an event when the order completes. On Shopify that means customer events, the web pixel API, which fires checkout_completed after payment. Server-side order webhooks arrive too, but they carry nothing that ties back to a browser.

The hard one is an identifier that survives between the two. The video played on a collection page at 9pm. The order completed on a product page on Thursday. Something has to say those were the same person.

Apps differ from each other on that third piece, and none of them put it on a pricing page.

Two different claims wearing the same label

Video sales almost always covers two things that deserve separate numbers.

A direct sale is when the shopper clicked the product out of the video and then bought that product. The video did the work and you can see the click that proves it.

An influenced sale is when the shopper watched a video featuring the product, browsed on, and bought it later. The video may have done the work. So may your email, your homepage, or the price.

The second number is always larger, and it is the one that gets quoted. If a dashboard shows a single figure called video revenue without saying which of the two it is, assume influenced.

The lookback window decides the number

Influenced sales need a window: how long after watching does a purchase still count. Seven days and thirty days produce very different figures for the same store in the same month, and nothing about the store changed between them.

So the window sets the revenue figure, and most dashboards do not show you what theirs is. Ask before you compare one app's number against another's.

Where these numbers break

The identifier lives in the browser, on one device. A shopper who watches on a phone and buys on a laptop is two different people as far as the join is concerned. That undercounts, and it undercounts hardest on the traffic you got from social, which is the traffic you installed the app for.

Clearing site data resets it. So does a fresh incognito window, and Safari's storage limits can do it without the shopper touching anything.

Credit goes to one video. Real orders often follow three or four. Apps pick last touch because it is cheap to compute.

None of that makes the numbers useless. It makes them a ranking rather than a ledger. Which of your videos is pulling ahead of the others is a question this data answers well. How much revenue video produced in August is a question it answers badly, and a vendor who tells you otherwise is selling you a rounding error with a dollar sign in front of it.

Four questions for a video app's analytics

1. Does the dashboard separate direct from influenced, or is there one blended number?
2. What is the lookback window on an influenced sale, and can I see it?
3. What identifier joins the view to the order, and what happens when the shopper switches devices?
4. Is the credited amount the line item or the whole order? An order holding a $30 video product and a $200 unrelated one reads very differently under those two rules.

What Maxproof does

Our numbers come from Shopify's web pixel on checkout_completed, one event per line item.

A sale counts as direct when that shopper's most recent click through to that product came from one of your videos. Otherwise we look for an influenced sale: a video they watched in the last 30 days with that product attached to it. We report the two separately and never add them into one figure.

Credit is last touch and goes to a single video, per line item, at the line item's amount. The identifier is stored in the shopper's browser on that device, with every limit listed above.

We report it this way because the ranking is the part you can act on. The video at the top of that list next month is the one worth cutting three more edits from.

One plan, $10 a month or $100 a year, every feature included. We never bill by views. There is a free 7 day Pro trial through the invite code on the homepage. Redeem the code before you subscribe, not after, because a store with an active subscription cannot redeem and the 7 days are lost.