Problem diagnosis · GA4
Your Shopify dashboard shows 200 orders this month. GA4 shows 120 purchases. You're not imagining it — the gap is real, it's common, and it has specific causes. Here are the seven most likely reasons, in order of how often I see them.
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GA4 tracks events but doesn't automatically treat them as conversions. If you haven't gone into Admin → Events and toggled "Mark as key event" for your purchase or form submission events, GA4's conversion count will show zero — even though the events are firing correctly.
The most destructive scenario: a previous developer left an old purchase tag in GTM alongside your new one. Both fire on checkout — GA4 deduplicates by transaction_id, so it looks like half your orders vanished. In reality they're there, just cancelled out. I've seen this in 30%+ of audits I run.
GTM changes only go live when you click Submit and publish a new version. A saved draft does nothing. If your tracking broke after someone "updated" GTM, check the Versions tab — there's almost certainly a draft sitting there with changes that never went live.
This isn't a configuration error — it's structural. Browser-based GA4 tracking gets blocked by uBlock Origin, Brave, Firefox ETP, and Safari's ITP before the event ever reaches Google's servers. In markets like the Netherlands, Germany, or with a tech-savvy audience, ad blocker rates can exceed 40%. These visitors are invisible to client-side GA4.
It's common to have separate GA4 properties for dev/staging and production. If the GTM container on your live site is pointing to the staging Measurement ID, all production purchase data is being sent to a property nobody is looking at.
Shopify's 2024 checkout extensibility migration removed access to the order confirmation page for many themes, breaking custom purchase event implementations that relied on the thank_you page trigger. If your GA4 purchase tracking stopped working around mid-2024, this is almost certainly why.
Your team visits your own site constantly — product checks, QA, link testing. Without an internal traffic filter, every visit from your office IP or VPN is counted in GA4. This doesn't reduce conversion count but inflates session numbers, making conversion rate look worse than it is and skewing funnel data.
Most setups have more than one issue running simultaneously — which is why diagnosing from the outside is hard. A proper audit goes through your actual GTM container, GA4 property, and dataLayer to identify every problem, not just the obvious one.
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