Understanding how tracking works helps you trust the Analytics dashboards, Attributed revenue figures, and A/B test results. Instant records events on your live Shopify storefront and connects them to the layouts you publish from the builder.
What gets tracked
On your live storefront, Instant records events through Shopify's storefront analytics — for example, opening an Instant Cart drawer. Each event carries context such as the layout it came from and the shopper's localization (country and language) so it can be grouped correctly.
From those events, Analytics builds:
Attributed revenue and orders — revenue and completed purchases tied to Instant-built pages, carts, and experiences (Analytics overview).
Cart metrics and a funnel — Instant Cart revenue, add-ons, AOV, conversion rate, and the Opened Cart → Checkout reached → Checkout completed funnel (Cart analytics).
Breakdowns — performance by device, OS, browser, country, and region.
A/B test results — which variant each enrolled visitor saw, and how it performed.
Instant does not replace Shopify's own analytics. Shopify Admin still reports store-wide totals; Instant focuses on performance attributable to Instant-built experiences, so the numbers won't match.
Event flow
At a high level:
A shopper visits your storefront and interacts with an Instant-built experience.
Instant's storefront script records the relevant events.
Events are attributed to the right layout (and A/B test, if any) and aggregated into dashboard metrics.
Processing takes a short time, so expect a brief delay before dashboards reflect a spike or a new publish.
Attributed revenue
Attributed revenue is revenue made from Instant-built pages, carts, and experiences, and Orders counts the shoppers who completed a purchase through them. An order that never touched an Instant experience stays in Shopify but isn't included in Instant's attributed totals.
Use attributed revenue to compare Instant pages and variants against each other — not to reconcile tax or accounting, where Shopify Admin is the source of truth.
Sessions and A/B test sessions
Analytics session counts power the funnel and conversion views.
A/B test sessions are a separate monthly pool, available on the Pro plan and up:
Pro — 10,000 A/B test sessions per month
Business — 100,000 A/B test sessions per month
A "session" here is one unique visitor enrolled in an active test; each enrolled visitor uses one session from your pool. The pool resets monthly. Free and Starter don't include A/B testing. Running out of sessions doesn't affect your storefront — new visitors simply stop being enrolled until the pool resets or you upgrade.
Visitors are enrolled only when they arrive through a test's A/B test link. See Create an A/B test.
Preview vs live
Analytics reflect real traffic on your live storefront. Builder previews and A/B test preview links (opened with a preview parameter) are for checking your work and generally don't feed production metrics. Always validate on the live theme after publishing.
Debugging checklist
Symptom | Check |
Zero page views | Is the layout published to the live theme? |
Purchases in Shopify but not attributed | Did the shopper's visit go through an Instant experience? Attributed totals always differ from Shopify Admin. |
A/B test stuck at 0 | Is the test's link being shared? |
Because tracking runs client-side through the storefront, privacy tools or ad blockers in a shopper's browser can reduce measured events — as they do for any client-side analytics.
Next steps: Analytics overview and Cart analytics for the dashboards, or Create an A/B test to run experiments.