How do I show Google Analytics traffic on the Dashboard?

Connect Google Analytics from a Google Analytics card to fill the traffic tables, the users chart and the visitors per ad platform.

The three cards

Three cards on the Summary dashboard come from Google Analytics instead of TrueROAS tracking:

• Traffic Sources: a table with Source, Pageviews, Users, Active, New, Engagement and Duration per traffic source, with a Total row. It lists the six biggest sources; click Show All with the count to see the rest and Show Less to fold them away. Click a column header to sort.
• Website Users by Traffic Source: a line chart with Total Users as a dashed line and the three biggest sources as their own lines. Direct and untracked visits are left out of the whole chart, so Total Users does not count them either.
• Unique visitors and add to carts by ad platform: a table with Unique visitors, Unique add to carts and Add-to-cart rate per ad platform, then Other and All visitors, explained below.

Until Google Analytics is connected, all three cards show Connect Google Analytics with the line Get insights about your website traffic, user behavior, and conversion data.

Reading the Traffic Sources table

• Pageviews shows the number of sessions Google Analytics counted for the source, not the number of pages viewed.
• Users and Active add up Google Analytics' daily figures, so a person who visits on two days is counted twice. They can be higher than the users Google Analytics shows for the same dates.
• Engagement and Duration are the median, the middle value, of Google Analytics' figures for the source, not an average. In the Total row they are averages, weighted by Users for Engagement and by Pageviews for Duration.
• The blue bar under each source name shows its share of all Pageviews.
• The table starts sorted by Users, highest first. Clicking the same header again flips the order. Source cannot be sorted.

Reading Unique visitors and add to carts by ad platform

• Unique visitors counts people, not visits. Someone who comes back five times in your date range counts once. Google Analytics counts a person per browser, so the same person on a phone and a laptop counts twice.
• Unique add to carts counts the people who added something to their cart at least once in a visit from that platform, not the number of times they did it.
• Add-to-cart rate is Unique add to carts divided by Unique visitors.
• The rows are Meta, Google Ads, TikTok, Pinterest, Snapchat, Bing and AppLovin. A platform only gets a row when it brought visitors in your date range. Other is everyone who did not come from an ad, such as direct visits, Google search, email and links on social media.
• All visitors counts everyone once. One person can come from Meta one day and Google Ads the next, so the rows add up to more than All visitors.
• A visit counts for an ad platform when the ad link has UTM tags, for example utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=paid. Google Ads visits count without them when auto-tagging is on in Google Ads. Ad visits without UTM tags show under Other, because Google Analytics cannot tell them apart from someone sharing a link.
• The table starts sorted by Unique visitors, highest first. Click Unique visitors, Unique add to carts or Add-to-cart rate to sort by it, and click again to flip the order. Other and All visitors always stay at the bottom.
• When the card reads Google Analytics has no add to carts for these dates, your store does not send add to cart events to Google Analytics. Shopify's Google & YouTube app sends them. On other stores, ask whoever set up Google Analytics to add them.
• When the line under the table ends with Google Analytics hides some small numbers to protect privacy, Google left out rows with very few people, so small numbers can be missing or lower than they really are.

Connect Google Analytics

1. On the card, click Connect Google Analytics. The button reads Connecting... while Google opens.
2. Sign in with the Google account that has access to your Google Analytics property and allow access.
3. If the card now shows a Connect Analytics button, click it and allow access to Analytics as well. This happens when your Google login was connected for Google Ads only.
4. Open the Select Analytics Property list and pick your property. While the list loads it reads Loading properties...; No properties available means the Google account has none.

The property is saved the moment you pick it, and the cards fill with data for your date range.

Switch to another property

Once a property is picked, the cards have no button to switch to another one. To switch:

1. Click your profile picture in the top right corner.
2. Under Your ad accounts, open the Select Analytics Property list and pick another property.

Picking No ad account chosen in that list removes the property, and the cards show the property list again.

Good to know

• The numbers come from Google Analytics, not from TrueROAS tracking, so they do not match the channel table or the sales cards. Google counts visits; TrueROAS counts orders.
• The connection uses your own Google login. If you already connected Google with that login, the card goes straight to the property list.
• When Google stops giving TrueROAS access, Unique visitors and add to carts by ad platform reads Google Analytics stopped giving us access. Click your profile picture in the top right and connect Google again.
• The three cards sit on the Summary dashboard by default and can be moved or removed like any other card. If your store changed its dashboards before Unique visitors and add to carts by ad platform existed, add it yourself from Available Metrics. See How do I add, move, resize and remove cards on a dashboard?. Available Metrics lists them under other names, which you can look up in What is each card called in Available Metrics?.
• On a phone, or when the card is narrow, scroll sideways inside the Traffic Sources table to see all its columns.
• Only one property can be connected at a time, and the cards cannot show conversions or revenue from Google Analytics.