47% of revenue with no source

The problem

A Shopify gift retailer couldn’t see which ads were driving sales. In GA4, 47% of revenue sat in the “Unassigned” channel. That’s revenue with no source attached.

Three causes, stacked

Checkout broke the session. The referral exclusion list in GA4 was empty. Every time a shopper moved through checkout or a payment provider, GA4 treated the return as a new visit from a new source. The original ad click was gone.

Tracking waited for a click. A page-speed app was deferring every Shopify Customer Events pixel until the visitor interacted with the page. Shoppers who landed and bought fast weren’t tracked the way they should be.

Purchases were counted three ways. Google Ads had three overlapping purchase sources: one from GTM, one imported from GA4, and one from the Shopping app. Two were set as Primary, so both counted toward bidding.

The fix

• Gave the store the list of checkout, payment, and wallet domains to add to GA4’s unwanted referrals. The store owner added them.
• Had the page-speed app’s vendor remove the analytics deferral that was blocking every tracking pixel.
• Demoted the Shopping app purchase to Secondary so bidding sees one purchase per order.
• Specified the cleanup for the store’s developer, who removed the legacy checkout scripts and paused the old manual purchase triggers.

What I checked

I confirmed script loading with a crawler and a tag debugger after each change. The attribution chain wasn’t live-tested end to end. The next step I recommended was a test purchase walked through GA4’s DebugView to confirm it.