Server-side tracking for a Shopify brand in five days
How we rebuilt Red Land Cotton's Shopify tracking, moved their ad platforms to server-side tracking and trained their team to read attribution, all in five days.
“We had three tools telling three different stories, and every agency told us our numbers were wrong. Systematik fixed our tracking in a week and showed our team how to read each platform. Now we make decisions from numbers we actually trust.”
Anna BrakefieldOwner, Red Land Cotton
Three tools, three different answers
Red Land Cotton sells American-made bedding and towels through their Shopify store. GA4, Shopify and Triple Whale each reported different numbers, and every agency told them their numbers were wrong.
As the owner put it, everything felt "a little jacked up." They needed numbers they could trust before the holidays.
A server-side setup that wasn't working: purchase data was not reaching GA4 at all.
Ad platforms learning from incomplete or duplicated purchase data.
A third of website traffic with no usable source, because UTMs were inconsistent across ad platforms.
Years of leftover scripts weighing down every page: an old Universal Analytics tag, Hotjar, GrowthBook, ClickCease and more.
A consent banner that kept tracking visitors after they declined, leaving the brand out of compliance and exposed to legal risk.
A team that couldn't tell a tracking problem from a normal attribution difference.
A standard Shopify store and edit access on day one let us go straight from audit to fix. Five days later, every platform was receiving clean, verified purchase data.
Tracking rebuilt
We fixed GA4 ecommerce tracking end to end, from product view to purchase, and removed the duplicate and outdated tags that were inflating their numbers.
Script cleanup
We removed the scripts that had piled up over the years, including an old Universal Analytics tag, Hotjar, GrowthBook and ClickCease. Each one added weight to every page and slowed the storefront down.
Consent that works
We fixed their consent banner so tracking follows each visitor's choice. Visitors who decline are no longer tracked, which removes the legal exposure of tracking without consent.
Server-side tracking
We moved GA4, Google Ads, Meta and Microsoft Ads to server-side tracking, so purchases are recorded even when a browser or ad blocker gets in the way.
Modern UTM Strategy
We set up our Modern UTM Strategy: one set of templates at the account level of each ad platform, readable by GA4 and Triple Whale, that no agency needs to touch.
Attribution training
We ran a one-hour session with their team on why GA4, Triple Whale and each ad platform report different numbers, and how to use each one to make decisions.
In five days, Red Land Cotton went from conflicting numbers to tracking they can rely on. GA4 purchases now match 99.8% of Shopify web orders, and the storefront loads 1.2 seconds faster on mobile.
All four platforms now receive every purchase from the server, visitors who decline consent are no longer tracked, and the team knows why each tool reports different numbers.
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