How to See Checkout Link Clicks in Shopify Reports

You share a checkout link in an email campaign. Clicks come in. Orders follow. But when you open Shopify Analytics, your checkout link traffic is invisible. It doesn't show up in your traffic reports, your marketing reports, or anywhere else in Shopify's native dashboards.

Until now, tracking checkout link performance meant relying on UTM parameters and Google Analytics. That works, but it puts your link data in a completely separate system from everything else — your sales, your sessions, your conversion funnel. You end up switching between tabs and cross-referencing numbers to get the full picture.

Checkout Links now emits native Shopify App Events every time someone clicks a link. That means your link clicks show up inside Shopify's own reporting — right next to your store sessions, your marketing channel data, and your sales metrics.

What Are Shopify App Events?

App Events are Shopify's way of letting apps report activity back into the platform. When an app emits an event, Shopify records it and makes it available in reports, analytics, and attribution flows.

For Checkout Links, the event is called link_visited. Every time a customer clicks one of your checkout links, this event fires with the link's shortcode and a unique click ID. Shopify receives it, logs it, and folds it into your store's analytics data.

This isn't a third-party tracking pixel. It's a native Shopify signal. The data lives where your other store data lives.

What This Means for Your Reporting

Link Traffic in One Place

Before App Events, you had two separate views of your checkout link performance:

• Checkout Links dashboard — clicks, conversions, revenue per link
• Shopify Analytics — sessions, sales, marketing attribution

The checkout links dashboard still exists and still tracks everything it always did. But now Shopify also knows about your link clicks natively. That means when you pull a marketing report, your checkout link activity isn't a blind spot.

Better Attribution

Shopify's marketing attribution has always been limited to channels it knows about — email, social, direct, organic search. Checkout link clicks fell into "direct" or "other" because Shopify had no signal that the traffic came from a checkout link.

With App Events, Shopify gets an explicit signal: this session started with a checkout link click. That data flows into Shopify's attribution models, giving you a clearer picture of which channels are actually driving revenue.

No Setup Required

This works automatically on every checkout link. There's nothing to enable, no toggle to flip, no API key to configure. If you have checkout links, they're already emitting App Events. Every click that happened after the update is already being reported to Shopify.

How It Works Under the Hood

When someone clicks a checkout link, three things happen in sequence:

1. The link resolves. Checkout Links looks up the shortcode, validates the link is active (not expired, not over its usage limit), and prepares the redirect.

2. The click is recorded. The click gets logged in Checkout Links' own analytics — same as before. This powers the clicks and conversion data in your app dashboard.

3. The App Event fires. A link_visited event is sent to Shopify's App Events API with the link's shortcode and a unique click ID. This happens in the background — it doesn't add any latency to the redirect. The customer doesn't wait for it.

The App Event emission is best-effort. If Shopify's API is slow or temporarily unavailable, the click still works, the customer still gets redirected, and the click is still recorded in your Checkout Links dashboard. The native Shopify event is additive — it enhances your reporting but never blocks the customer experience.

Combining App Events with UTM Parameters and Order Tags

App Events, UTM parameters, and order tags each answer a different question:

They work together, not as alternatives.

Use App Events to see how much traffic your checkout links generate relative to your other channels. This is the bird's-eye view — are checkout links driving 5% of your sessions or 30%?

Use UTM parameters when you need to know which specific campaign or channel drove the click. A link shared in your Klaviyo flow should have different UTMs than the same link shared on Instagram. App Events tell Shopify the click came from a checkout link; UTMs tell you which checkout link.

Use order tags when you need revenue attribution at the order level. Tags show up on every order in Shopify, so you can filter, export, and report on exactly which links drove which sales. App Events track clicks; order tags track purchases.

The strongest setup uses all three: App Events for session-level data in Shopify, UTMs for campaign-level data in Google Analytics, and order tags for order-level data in Shopify.

What You Should Do

Nothing — it's already working. But here's how to get the most out of it:

1. Check your Shopify Analytics over the next few days. Look for checkout link activity in your traffic and marketing reports. The data is flowing in now.

2. Compare with your Checkout Links dashboard. The numbers won't match exactly — App Events track sessions on Shopify's side, while the app dashboard tracks raw clicks. But the trends should align. If one link is your top performer in the app, it should show meaningful activity in Shopify too.

3. Add UTM parameters and order tags if you haven't already. App Events give you the baseline — your links are visible in Shopify. UTMs and tags give you the granularity to know exactly which links are driving which revenue.

Checkout Links is $25/month and includes App Events, UTM parameters, order tagging, pre-checkout pages, and Shopify Flow actions. Every link you create automatically reports back to Shopify — no extra configuration, no per-click fees.