You noticed Shopping and Performance Max revenue in Google Analytics that are not displayed on your Quanticfy dashboards. You might also have noticed some UTMs in Google Analytics containing sag_organic. This comes from the same issue.
What is sag_organic?
The “SAG” in sag_organic stands for Surfaces Across Google.
Surfaces Across Google was the name of the Google feature that enabled “free shopping listings”. It has since been renamed to “free shopping listings” and the name “SAG” is no longer used in Google, but seems to still exist in Shopify.
Where does the issue come from?
It is likely that Shopify wrongly sets up the product UTMs (it seems to be a bug on their side). Usually, Shopify e-merchants use Shopify “Google & Youtube” app to synchronize their Shopify Product Listing to Google Merchant Center. Once products are in Google Merchant Center (GMC), they can be displayed in organic search results. Those can also be advertised.
When Shopify synchronizes your products with the Google Merchant Center, it automatically sets the following UTMs:
utm_source: google
utm_medium: product_sync
utm_campaign: sag_organic
utm_content: sag_organic
This generates UTMs all looking like so:
&utm_medium=product_sync&utm_source=google&utm_content=sag_organic&
utm_campaign=sag_organic
Those parameters will be added to your product URL wherever Google displays it: on an Organic search result as well as an Ad. This prevents external trackers, like the Quanticfy tag, from correctly identifying Paid vs Organic traffic.
You can confirm this by going to your Merchant Center > Products > All Products > and clicking on one of your products that was uploaded via the API. Look at the product URL / link and you will see the UTM tags in there.
⚠️ If you need help with the general parameterizing of UTMs, visit our UTM guide.
How to fix the issue
Google Merchant Center lets us rewrite URLs between what Shopify sends and what Google displays. Our current advice is to remove UTMs at this level and only keep auto-tagging (gclid).
⚠️ The Shopify Community seems to have found both an explanation and a solution for this issue. We did not implement this solution ourselves (as we can't access your GMC account), so your feedback would be very helpful.
If you want us to help you through this process and set up a workshop, please open a ticket using the chatbot (at the right bottom corner of the screen).
Here are the steps we recommend to follow:
Remove the UTM tags using Feed Rules:
Go to Merchant Center > Products > Feeds
Click on "Content API" feed
Click on the Feed Rules tab
Click the + button and type "link" and select "link" to create a new rule for the link attribute
Click cancel under Data Sources and then Modifications > Add Modifications
Optimize URL > Remove Parameter
Type utm_medium and click add
Repeat for utm_source, utm_content, and utm_campaign
Click OK and look in the right-side column preview to see if the link has been properly updated.
Click Save as Draft
Click Apply
Wait a while for your feed rules to take effect.
⚠️ It should take 2 days for the feed to update, and another 7 days for the attribution computation to run. So if you check back 9 days later, you should be able to tell if the issue is resolved or not. Please share your feedback with us!
If the process is successful, you should be able to see the organic sales in the organic search channel in Quanticfy, and the paid sales in their respective paid channel (paid Google, perfmax, etc.) with their habitual UTMs (including campaign name and ad group).