Riviera Towel Co — Tracking Fix Case Study (Shopify • GA4 • GTM • Google Ads)

Author: Daniel Boluwaduro

Date range of work: Sept 11–16, 2025

Stack: Shopify (Online Store + Checkout Extensibility), Google Tag Manager (GTM‑M6MB4**), Google Analytics 4 (G‑YDY51DV***), Google Ads (AW‑935284***), Google Merchant Center (MC‑V41J4HG***)

1) Executive summary

Problem: Purchases were tracked but deduplicating more values, leading to a mismatch in the no of purchases recorded from the product (Shopify) and the tracking source (GA4 via GTM)t he value was fixed at $1, ROAS was unreliable, multiple tags were firing (duplication risk), and GTM didn’t execute on checkout.

What I changed:

• Installed GTM on theme pages (head + noscript) and stopped relying on it inside checkout (Shopify forbids GTM there).
• Built a Shopify Customer Event custom pixel that listens to checkout_completed and pushes one clean purchase payload into dataLayer with value, currency, transaction_id, tax, shipping, and full items[].
• In GTM, created a single custom event trigger (purchase_khomenidigital) that fires:
  • GA4 Event: purchase (e‑commerce object from the data layer).
  • Google Ads Conversion: dynamic value + currency with Enhanced Conversions (email + address from the payload).
• De‑duplicated by removing/retiring other purchase tags (Hyros, legacy UA, app‑level duplicates) or setting them to Secondary.

Outcome:

• GA4 DebugView shows purchase with real value, currency, transaction_number, items, tax, and shipping.
• Google Ads conversion now carries the correct dynamic value (no more $1 placeholders).
• Consent Mode & Enhanced Conversions confirmed active.
• Stable, single‑source purchase attribution for GA4 and Google Ads.

2) Context & constraints