Why are visitor counts higher in Propel Replays than in Shopify?

Propel Replays sets a unique key in every visitor's browser that helps us identify them as repeat visitors when they return to your site. This works great with Chrome / Safari / Edge but not as well for visitors browsing your site from within Instagram and Facebook.

Instagram and Facebook have their own proprietary browser that doesn't persist Propel Replay's unique visitor keys between visits, and so Propel Replays is unable to identify them as repeat visitors. The result is that every visitor browsing your site via Instagram and Facebook unfortunately gets counted as a "new visitor" in Propel Replays.

Shopify uses additional techniques to "fingerprint" visitors and is able to get around the restrictions imposed by the Instagram/Facebook browser.

We plan to implement a similar technique in the future, but we don't yet have a set timeframe for this.