I’ve walked through all our events looking at the %unassigned.
Session start - 3% unassigned
Add to basket - 6% unassigned
Begin checkout - 25% unassigned
I’ve seen this before on a non-shopify ecommerce website, and the issue was that the GA4 tag was delayed waiting for a cookie consent check, and the ecommerce tags were firing very early from the data layer push events. And when the GA4 tag hasn’t fired the events get tracked as unassigned.
I don’t know a lot about how sliderule works, is it possible that on the checkout above with 25% unassigned, the ecommerce event is firing before the GA4 config and therefore losing the tracking?
No. In this case begin_checkout fires server-side. If there’s no server-side session associated with the event, you’ll get more unattributed. That can happen a lot with cookie blockers, etc.
In this instance, we’re not using a cookie blocker - all page_views and events are coming through SlideRule.
Can you suggest why this step in the ecommerce checkout has a steep increase in unassigned traffic? My understanding is that all GA4 interactions are triggering serverside, so the only reason it wouldn’t have a session associated is if it was a new page and the ecommerce event fires before the GA4 tag?
Most GA4 events fire client side. In fact, SlideRule is unusual in that it fires any event server-side. If you take a look at the browser_begin_checkout event what do you see?
The browser_xxx events have better attribution, but lower accuracy, only collecting 50% - 75% of purchases.
Sorry I confused this matter with saying server side, it’s not really what I was asking about, only highlighting that the gTag firing and event collection were both being managed by Sliderule through the same mechanism. And what I was really wanting your feedback on was the order of these 2 collections. Can you confirm that using SlideRule the gTag is always initialising before the ecommerce collection event? Or is the order of these dictated by how our site is built and something we have control over?
Thanks again for picking this up, feel like we’ve been trying to resolve this unassigned issue since GA4 began!
That’s what I would expect. browser_ has better attribution but worse accuracy. Unfortunately, that’s just the way it is. You can combine the attribution of browser_ with the accuracy of server-side (and even Shopify) using Big Query. That’s what we do on our data team plans and as part of our chatbot. Regardless I highly recommend you set up a Big Query connection to GA4 asap as it does not backfill data.
Yes. We initialize the tags in the correct order. This just seems to be an issue with GA4 on some sites.