Introduction
Seeing different numbers between Heatmap and Shopify? Good! That's by design. Shopify analytics provides a broad overview of your store’s total performance, including discounts, returns, and general visitor activity. However, heatmap is laser-focused on behavior and tracking engaged website visitors, offering clearer, more actionable data to optimize your website.
This article will help you to understand how and why these two data approaches are intentionally different, and then get running on Heatmap!
1. Shopify’s “Sessions Over Time” vs Heatmap’s “Engaged Sessions”
Definition: Shopify defines a session as a continuous period of activity by a visitor, which expires after 30 minutes of inactivity or at midnight UTC (Shopify session definition). If a visitor lands directly at checkout and makes a purchase, Shopify still counts this as a session (Shopify acquisition reporting).
How it Works:
Server-side tracking: Captures all hits to your Shopify-hosted store.
Includes passive browsing, instant bounces, and minimal filtering of bot/spam traffic (Shopify Analytics overview).
Primarily intended for general business-level reporting, such as overall traffic volume and marketing effectiveness (Shopify behavior reporting).
Standard Sessions on Heatmap
Definition: Heatmap sessions are explicitly engagement-driven, starting only when users click or scroll or spend at least 5 seconds on the site.
How it Works:
Client-side tracking: Focused on browser-based interactions.
Strictly filters out instant bounces, accidental visits, and bot traffic, providing cleaner analytics data optimized for actionable insights.
Specifically built to provide detailed analytics optimized for e-commerce conversion and website improvement.
Key Differences (Shopify vs Heatmap)
Why This Matters:
Shopify Sessions: Great for broad, business-level metrics (overall sessions, basic traffic insights).
Heatmap Sessions: Critical for accurately optimizing your website’s UX, CRO efforts, and targeted marketing strategies
2. Shopify vs Heatmap AOV (Average Order Value)
Shopify calculates Average Order Value (AOV) using:
Shopify’s reported AOV includes transactions from all sales channels, including your online store, Shop App, Instagram, Facebook, and other sales channels, not just website-specific sales (Shopify Sales Channels).
Returns and refunds are factored into your final reported "Net Sales," which can skew website-specific metrics (Shopify Net Sales Calculation).
Shopify also excludes taxes and shipping costs from the AOV calculation, despite these being genuine sources of revenue from customers (Shopify Sales Reports).
Why Shopify AOV is Limited for Website Optimization:
Includes returns, reducing accuracy for website optimization.
Includes non-website channels, muddying web-specific metrics.
Excludes shipping and tax revenues, understating true revenue per customer.
Heatmap AOV (Average Order Value)
Heatmap’s Average Order Value (AOV) calculation focuses solely on your website transactions, providing a cleaner metric for website optimization. Specifically:
Excludes refunds and returns, focusing only on true initial purchase intent.
Excludes non-website transactions (such as Shop App, Instagram/Facebook Shop, POS, and subscription renewals), ensuring accurate web analytics.
Includes tax and shipping, reflecting the total revenue per customer from your site, making Heatmap's AOV slightly higher and more actionable than Shopify’s.
This is the formula taken directly from Shopify:
Heatmap AOV Calculation:
Why Heatmap AOV is More Actionable:
Provides clear insight into real website performance.
Offers true visibility of user purchasing behavior and revenue per session.
Better suited for optimizing marketing and product decisions specific to your site.
Why This Matters for Your Business:
Shopify's AOV is built for business-level reporting and accounting, while Heatmap's AOV is specifically optimized to give actionable insights for website optimization. For making smarter, data-driven decisions to enhance your site's conversion rates, UX, and revenue, Heatmap’s AOV provides clearer, more precise analytics.
3. Shopify’s "Add to Cart" Metrics
Shopify’s analytics primarily measure "Sessions with Add-to-Cart" events, defined as:
Number of sessions in which at least one product was added to a user's cart (Shopify Behavior Reports).
Shopify does not explicitly document counting each individual add-to-cart click within the same session separately, only the presence or absence of at least one cart addition per session.
This approach provides broad insights into cart interactions at the session level, which is useful for a general understanding of cart engagement across your site.
Heatmap’s "Add to Cart" Metrics
Heatmap tracks individual "Add to Cart" events explicitly and precisely:
Records every single Add-to-Cart click independently, offering detailed, granular analytics about actual user interactions.
Tied explicitly to engaged sessions (real user behavior), allowing marketers to identify precise product interests and optimize accordingly.
Filters out accidental clicks, bots, and unengaged sessions, ensuring data reflects genuine user intent and actionable insights.
When optimizing your website, this provides far more actionable, detailed data on product-page effectiveness. Heatmap goes down to the element, making this your ultimate optimization engine.
4. Net sales vs web sales
When you click the Analytics tab in Shopify, you’ll see a large chart with a revenue number at the top. This number is Total Sales, which is calculated with all purchase methods, whether on or off-website transactions. Heatmap reports Website Revenue as it’s a web analytics tool.
Shopify’s Total Sales is most useful for business and not website performance for multiple reasons:
It takes out refunds
It includes instant bounces of users who never “shopped”
It includes off-website sources (point-of-sale, TikTok/Instagram shop, Shop App) which are not transactions that originate from your website
Draft orders are included in this revenue number
The goal of Heatmap, as a behavioral analytics tool, is to capture human behavior exclusively on your website. If you see discrepancies between Shopify and Heatmap, this is the cause.
To get your “apples to apples” revenue, view the Total Sales by Channel Report and look at Online Store. This shows the revenue of sales that originated from your website. View this image below:
You may notice a slight difference in revenue (less than 5%), which is often due to users landing directly on Checkout at the start of their session. Heatmap does not track these, by design, as Heatmap collects data that originates on your website.
5. Web Orders vs Total Orders
In Shopify, there are two “transactions” metrics: Orders and Orders Fulfilled. Orders as a metric includes all sources, including those that are off-website transactions. This will make your Heatmap Purchases metric appear lower than Shopify’s Orders as we are only tracking this metric.
Orders Fulfilled is a better metric to use, as some may be processing, but still reports on all purchase sources beyond your website. You can view Orders Fulfilled on this image below:
Still Curious About Our Data?
Read more about heatmap's data definitions and methodology to maximize your Ecommerce growth.