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Help me figure out the source of traffic that led to over 20 sales in 3 days on my Shopify website
Posted by on May 12, 2023 at 6:08 pmHi everyone,
I run an ecommerce website on Shopify and I’m trying to figure out where a recent and sudden surge of sales came from. Over a 3 days period last week, I received over 20 orders, all of which came in on desktop and had a conversion rate of 85%.
The only lead I have is the utm\_content=Facebook\_UA param, which is from the product feed I have synced to Facebook and Instagram as Shopify adds that to the query string of each product URL in the feed. However, I have not been running any Facebook ads during this period and my follows on both platforms are very small.
On the morning of the first day this happened, I turned on Checkout on Facebook and Instagram via the Shopify Admin. I am wondering if this somehow had anything to do with it.
Also I should mention I sent an email out to the customers asking them “How Did You Hear About Us?” but didn’t receive any responses.
Lastly, most of the traffic did not have the fbclid param so it doesn’t seem like this was from an organic post/share directly on FB or IG.
I would really appreciate it if anyone could shed some light on this and help me figure out where the traffic came from. I have been pulling my hair out trying to figure this out but haven’t been able to.Thanks in advance!
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1 Reply
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Maybe someone saw your FB ad and shared it organically. Unless you can see more UTM data in Shopify and or Google Analytics, it will be hard to figure out where the conversions came from.
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Most obvious thing that comes to mind is check for fraud. Not sure if you use Stripe, but if you have Radar settings turned right down, and fraudsters find stolen cards are working – they will all flock to you.
If you’re not taking card payments, then less likely. PayPal etc is fantastic at preventing fraud.
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In order to track event attribution you need to have conversion tracking setup and use UTM parameters on your links that are outside of google ecosystem so you can identify the source / medium of the conversion event.
Once this is configured, it does not work retroactively. So you will only be able to properly track events going forward from the date of the configuration.
That being said, if you are seeing inbound traffic coming from Meta that is associated with the purchase event, unless it was coming from links with UTM parameters, it will show up as social referral traffic.
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Yeah, sounds very fraudy. I wouldn’t ship the product unless you can confirm the buyer info. Not sure if it’s a thing, but if you can put the card charges in a pending status that might be good too.
Most obvious explanation is some kinda attempted credit card fraud.
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Remember that conversions have a conversion time window. Some are 30 days. Your customer(s) might have clicked on an ad 15 days ago and just decided to convert today.
Maybe the url was shared also, most people don’t strip the url from utm parameters and send it over WhatsApp or sms chat and some of these don’t show the full url link but just the og image link that takes you to the page.
Did you let that campaign run long enough or did you think it wasn’t performing and you paused it?
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Hmm interesting one. Without having access to your analytics some ideas that come to mind.
I would try to look in depth into where the traffic came from exactly, to the point of country, region, town. In your GA see if there was a big influx of traffic from this one area, this is a sign of bots and perhaps fraudulent sales. So while you’re looking specifically at the conversions themselves, widen your perspective to the traffic that resulted in the conversions and see what you can find (if you haven’t already that is).
The other thing I’d wonder is if your organic socials automatically generate the utm parameter for Facebook? Dark Social is a phrase you’ll hear a lot these days and it’s due to the amount of channels being used to share posts, information, ads etc. that no attribution software correctly detects.
I know you mentioned no ads are running at the moment, but take a look at your recent ads that have finished and see if the conversions have spiked even while off. If the conversion window is 30 days for example since they clicked on your ad. Well then if they come back several times within those 30 days and then eventually convert, this will still be attributed to your ad. So maybe check your ad manager for this?
Not sure I’ve helped at all, just thinking out loud. Hope it’s legit and hopefully you can replicate it. The best of luck
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