Tracking rarely breaks loudly. There's no error page, no alert from Shopify, no drop in orders. A purchase simply stops reaching one of your platforms, and the dashboards keep showing numbers, just smaller ones.
By the time someone asks why return on ad spend dropped, campaigns have often spent weeks optimising on partial data.
The five most common silent failures
1. A theme update moved a script. New theme, new checkout tweaks, a script that no longer loads where it used to. The store looks better; the purchase report quietly stops.
2. A new app conflicts with existing tracking. Several apps that each "add tracking" can send the same sale twice, or overwrite each other's setup. (One of our clients, Troop London, had a third-party app conflict that had split their Meta event setup.)
3. A consent banner isn't wired to the tracking. The banner asks the question, but the answer never reaches the tracking, so purchases are either blocked when they shouldn't be, or sent when they shouldn't be.
4. A platform connection expires. Access to an ad account lapses, and sales stop being accepted.
5. The same sale is sent twice. Two tools both report purchases to the same platform, and results look better than they are.
How to spot them
- Compare Shopify orders with the purchases GA4 and your ad platforms received, every week. A sudden change is a signal.
- Check your purchase reports after every theme update or new app install. Put it in the calendar.
- Look for days where one platform's purchases drop to zero or double.
How to stop them lasting for weeks
The fix isn't a better dashboard. It's knowing, quickly, when a platform stops receiving what Shopify records.
GTM Assistant sends each sale server-side, directly to your platforms, so a blocked or broken browser tag doesn't lose the sale. Our team sets it up with you so each platform has one sender. If a connection breaks, for example an expired token, the app alerts you straight away. It's built on Shopify's Customer Privacy API, so every customer's consent choice is respected before any event is sent.
If you'd rather not keep an eye on it yourself, that's what the managed plans are for. On and , we monitor your tracking and fix problems with you, and adds a quarterly review call with a re-audit of every connected platform. On Pay as you go, you get the app's automatic alerts, and our team helps when you ask.
Check yours
If you can't answer "is our tracking working right now?" in ten seconds, it's worth checking. Our free tracking audit compares the orders and revenue Shopify recorded with what GA4 and Google Ads received, and flags duplicate purchases. We reply within 24 hours. The report takes up to one week.