When marketers and CRO teams compare analytics tools, they assume the numbers should match. At Heatmap, our philosophy and data model are based on the premise that not all data is created equal. More importantly, not all data is useful.
Most analytics platforms were built for business reporting or accounting. Heatmap was built for one purpose: to help you optimize and grow your business through website optimization.
Heatmap intentionally removes Junk Traffic from your analytics. It’s non-human sessions, instant bounces, or sessions where a user left in seconds and didn’t make a single interaction. Junk Traffic has been found to account for 4-12% of total traffic. You’ve likely been using Junk Traffic to optimize your website and (probably) didn’t know!
So when you notice Heatmap’s Engaged Sessions or other metrics slightly differ from Shopify or GA4, remember that’s the purpose! This is 100% intentional and done by design. We’re not here to replace Shopify or GA4. We’re here to give you wickedly actionable web analytics data.
Below, we explain exactly Heatmap’s data methodology to deliver clean, actionable data. You’ll quickly understand why Heatmap’s web analytics should be your website’s source of truth.
TLDR: Use Shopify & GA4 data for accounting, use Heatmap data for growth.
1. We Only Track Engaged, Human Sessions
In most analytics tools, a session is any “touch” to your website (human or not). Instant bounces, zero-engagement sessions, and even sessions where your website doesn’t load are counted! In our testing of other analytics platforms, even AI agents count as sessions. You can read this document to understand the exact definitions of all metrics on the Heatmap platform.
Heatmap’s data model does the hard work for you. To count as a session, a visit must hit these requirements:
A visit must have a scroll, click, or any activity on the page
A visit must be active for at least 5 seconds
Not be detected as a bot, crawler, AI agent, or internal traffic (non-Junk Traffic)
If you’re comparing Heatmap vs GA4’s Session Count, there are different requirements. In Google’s tech docs, these are GA4’s requirements for Engaged Sessions:
Lasts longer than 10 seconds
Includes two or more pageviews or screenviews
Triggers at least one conversion event
In our team’s professional experience, these requirements are extreme. On many websites, up to 50% of sessions are not counted in GA4 data! 4-12% of sessions being considered as unengaged sessions are a lot more realistic and actionable. This is another core philosophy and intentional decision we made in our data modeling.
In Heatmap’s Web Analytics, we don’t count “every touch” as Shopify does, and we don’t have extreme exclusionary metrics like GA4. This isn’t underreporting, it’s accuracy by design.
2. Revenue Transactions We Don’t Track
Heatmap is a web analytics tool. There are transactions in your Ecommerce business that do not happen on your website or begin directly in Checkout. Heatmap only tracks sessions and purchases (revenue) that originate on your website.
It is very important to understand that Heatmap’s reported revenue will be lower than your “Net Sales” metric on Shopify because there are many potential sources of revenue that do not originate from your website. Please read this document to understand how to compare “apples to apples” data on Shopify vs Heatmap. Some examples of transactions that do not happen on your website:
Subscriptions
Manually-created orders (manual bulk purchases, customer-support transactions, etc)
Draft orders that are not from your website
Shop App Transactions (these are from Shop App, not your website)
Mobile App Transactions
Point-of-Sale (POS) Transactions (physical retail orders)
SMS-Native Transactions that do not touch your website
TikTok Shop
Meta & Instagram Shop
Checkout-only Sessions from other platforms that only use Shopify Checkout
These revenue transactions are reported in Shopify, which is great! But these are not website transactions. Because these are not counted, please take these into consideration when analyzing your Heatmap data:
Non-website transactions (on Shopify) are included in revenue metrics such as Gross Revenue, Net Sales, and Gross Sales. These are not tracked in Heatmap’s Total Revenue.
Your Average Order Value in Shopify includes all transactions in your business, and Heatmap only tracks website transactions. This will cause your Average Order Value to look slightly different, and likely higher. Heatmap reports your Website Average Order Value on your dashboard.
Conversion Rate will present differently as Total Transactions divided by Engaged Sessions only calculates Conversion Rate (not website transactions). As Heatmap excludes Junk Traffic, your Conversion Rate may appear slightly different than your Shopify Conversion Rate.
3. Refunds Are Not Counted in Heatmap
As Shopify beautifully reports full-business metrics, refunds are removed from Net Sales. Refunds are not removed in Heatmap, as we intentionally track conversions that are only from your website.
Removing Refunds also changes Shopify's reported Average Order Value. This is valuable for business reporting, but not for website optimization. When using web analytics data to optimize your website, you do not want refunds “carved out” from the front-end performance metrics.
As we’ve stated multiple times, Heatmap should not replace your Shopify or GA4 data, but should be used to hyper-focus on website performance.
4. Tax & Shipping Revenue Are Included in AOV
In early 2023, Shopify changed its AOV calculation by excluding Tax and Shipping Revenue from its Average Order Value. In Heatmap’s Data Philosophy, revenue is revenue. We include Tax & Shipping Revenue for very specific reasons:
Tax & Shipping are sources of revenue for your business, so why wouldn’t you want all your revenue in your analytics?
Some customers spend more for faster shipping. This is very important in understanding your true AOV and how customers spend on your website. It must be in there!
As Tax & Shipping revenue is included in Total Sales, this creates a mismatch from your revenue calculations to your Average Order Value
For these reasons, Heatmap is proud to intentionally include these in our data tracking. This gives you more actionable data to optimize your website.
5. Heatmap Does Not Use Cookies
Most web analytics platforms rely on cookies to identify sessions and users. It’s how they “know” if a visitor is returning, how long they’ve been on the site, or what pages they’ve viewed. At Heatmap, we made an intentional decision: we don’t use cookies or collect any PII.
We use LocalStorage, a more modern, client-side tracking method that gives us full control over how engagement is measured, without relying on fragile, outdated cookie logic. This makes Heatmap one of the most compliant analytics platforms in your stack, fully aligned with GDPR and global privacy laws. Read this document to learn how we’ll be one of the most compliant software in your tech stack.
Unlike cookies, which can be blocked, cleared, or expire without warning, LocalStorage remains intact unless a user actively clears it. This gives you more stable and consistent data across visits.
With LocalStorage, we can rebuild session logic from scratch to reflect real customer behavior, not browser quirks or legacy definitions.
Because we’re not relying on passive browser behavior, we can tie every action back to intent:
Every session is human
Every conversion is tied to a real website visit
Every metric is filtered for action, not just presence
The result: Heatmap gives you more actionable data and a more accurate source of truth for website performance.
Ready to See for Yourself?
Sign up for Heatmap.com if you want to scale your Ecommerce business with more reliable web analytics for all your Conversion Rate Optimization efforts. It’s extremely affordable, requires zero custom code, provides AI insights, and takes less than 5 minutes to set up! Get started with a free trial here 👉 www.heatmap.com/pricing