You may have noticed traffic from Instagram isn’t showing up (as much as it should) within your Google Analytics reports.
This is because Instagram on the phone doesn’t open profile links natively, instead it passes them to your browser, which opens them directly.
The result being that this traffic appears in GA under ‘direct referrals’ – with no attribution towards Instagram.
Fortunately, there’s a way round this.
Using Google’s URL builder, we can append tracking code to our Shopify’s store URL.
The details you’ll want to put into Google’s URL builder are:
Website URL: Your website
Campaign Source: Instagram
Campaign Medium: Social
Campaign Name: Profile
This results in a URL like the below:
Photo credit: coffeeringsandscribbledthings.com
That’s pretty ugly, right?
So here’s the solution. Shopify has a URL redirect feature somewhat hidden away within its settings.
First go to (what’s recently been named) ‘Online Store’.
Then select ‘Navigation’:
At this point, you’ll see hidden in the top right the option for ‘URL Redirects’ – choose that:
Then comes the fun part. Choose to ‘Add a URL Redirect’:
Then for the URL redirect. You want to add something like ‘/insta’ as the Old Path, and put your full site address with UTM parameters in Redirects to path (example below):
N.B. It’s important here that you include the http:// part, otherwise Shopify will treat it as a relative URL not an absolute one (and thus it won’t work).
Hit Save URL redirect and you can test your url.
For example, with the above, I’d type pressurewashdirect.co.uk/insta into my browser, and hit enter. It should take me to my site’s home page. And if you look in the address bar you’ll see all the extra UTM parameters which feeds details back to Google Analytics.
So that’s it! You can use this new vanity URL in your instagram profile, and fully track your instagram traffic.
Any questions on this, ask me in the comments.
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