Noticed any changes to your Shopify reporting dashboards in september? You’re not alone; Shopify’s just completely overhauled how it measures sessions for all stores.
Rolled out between September 21 and 23, 2026, Shopify's latest update changes how the platform measures both sessions and session-based metrics - including your conversion rate and add-to-cart rate.
If you manage a Shopify store and keep a keen eye on your performance, understanding these changes is essential. Without this context, you could easily misread a data shift as a marketing win or a sudden problem, when in reality it's simply a change in how Shopify counts activity behind the scenes.
So...
What Are the Shopify Analytics Changes?
Shopify is rolling out three core changes to analytics, all of which involve how sessions are measured.
#1 - Bot sessions are identified and filtered by default
Shopify has been able to distinguish bot traffic from genuine customers since October 2025, and it later gave merchants the option to filter bot sessions out of their analytics dashboard manually. Going forward, however, this filtering will be the default setting rather than an opt-in.
This change will likely be most noticeable for stores that receive a lot of bot traffic, which typically scales alongside your paid media spend - the more you invest in ads, the more bot activity tends to follow.
Merchants can still choose to include bot sessions in their analytics if they want to. But by default, you'll now get a much cleaner view of genuine customer activity.
#2 - Sessions without a traditional pageview are now counted
Counteracting the reduction in sessions from bot filtering, some additional sessions that previously went unrecorded are now being counted. Specifically, this covers customer journeys that don't begin with a normal storefront pageview.
This includes customers who click directly through to a cart or checkout page - for example, via Instagram Shopping, a paid social ad, or a direct checkout link shared elsewhere. These journeys skip the usual storefront landing page entirely, which meant they weren't previously captured as sessions. Now, they are.
#3 - Sessions no longer reset at midnight UTC
The smallest of the three changes: Shopify is recalibrating how the start and end of a session are determined. Previously, a session would reset at midnight UTC regardless of what the customer was doing at that moment. Now, that activity is consolidated into a single session rather than being split into two.
This will have a much larger effect on stores in the US, where midnight UTC falls between 5pm and 9pm local time - a period when customers are far more likely to be actively browsing than, say, 3am.
Here's an example of this in practice: a customer in California begins browsing at 4:51pm PDT, shops for a while, and completes their purchase at 5:04pm PDT. During that window, they cross midnight UTC. Previously, Shopify would have counted that as two separate sessions - one on each calendar day - with only the second session showing a conversion. Going forward, this is recorded as a single session, attributed to the time the customer started browsing.
What Does This Mean for Your Analytics Dashboard?
All three changes affect what Shopify counts as a session, but sessions aren't the only metric involved. Shopify itself has confirmed that the following metrics will be affected:
- Sessions
- Conversion rate
- Add-to-cart rate
- Reached checkout rate
- Checkout conversion rate
- Bounce rate
- Pageviews per session
- Online store visitors
- Searches
For most percentage-based metrics - conversion rate, add-to-cart rate, reached checkout rate, and similar - you're likely to see a positive shift month on month. For example, your conversion rate might climb from 2.3% to 2.6% without any change in your actual sales activity.
Normally, a jump like that would prompt some investigation: Was it a CRO action? Did a new product launch overperform? Did Meta ads do a lot of the heavy lifting before people landed on-site? Those are still worth asking, but there's a good chance the real driver is simply Shopify's updated tracking methodology rather than anything you changed.
It's equally important to note what isn't changing. Metrics that don't depend on session counting - such as orders, sales, and customer counts - remain exactly as accurate as before. So if, a month from now, you see fewer sessions but a higher conversion rate with no meaningful change in sales volume, don't panic: the shift in measurement is doing its work in the background, not signalling a problem with your store.
So What Can You Do?
Use September 2026 as your new baseline.
It's a frustrating adjustment, but you'll essentially need to treat September 2026 as a fresh starting point for session-based metrics. You can still use historical data to compare core business metrics like orders, sales, and customer counts, but you should be cautious about comparing September 2026 to September 2025 for anything session-based - sessions, conversion rate, add-to-cart rate - since it's no longer a like-for-like comparison.
Add context to historical data
This doesn't mean your older data is now useless. You can still use it to spot seasonal trends and recurring patterns. If sessions have historically peaked in November around Black Friday and the gifting season, that seasonal pattern will still hold true going forward - only the absolute numbers will shift.
The key is to read each metric in the context of the others, following the chain:
Revenue → Orders → Customers → Sessions → Conversion behaviour
A few practical checks to run as you adjust to the new baseline:
- If your conversion rate jumps but revenue and orders stay relatively flat, look at the analytics methodology change before crediting the improvement to a CRO initiative.
- If sessions drop but revenue holds steady, bot filtering is a likely explanation for at least part of the difference.
- If sessions increase, consider whether Shopify is now capturing legitimate customer journeys - like direct-to-checkout clicks - that simply weren't being recorded before.
Is This a Positive Change?
On the whole, yes. Shopify's updates give merchants a cleaner, more accurate picture of site performance by recognising genuine customers rather than inflating - or in some cases, masking - activity with bot traffic.
Going forward, this creates a more reliable baseline to measure performance against. The trade-off is a short-term adjustment period: you'll need to recontextualise any data from before September 2026 rather than comparing it directly to what you see now.
Want to take the learnings from your analytics dashboard to the next stage? Contact our Shopify agency team and let’s talk about your growth journey.
