Ex Google Optimize user with a Shopify store, what is the migration path?
We ran our entire testing program through Google Optimize until the sunset last September, and I will admit the program has been on vacation ever since. Time to get it back to work.
The store is a classic Liquid theme, nothing headless, and GTM is already installed and healthy. I keep reading about Croct in the context of headless React storefronts, so my question is whether a plain Liquid store like ours is even a fit, and what the setup path looks like if it is.
2 answers
A Liquid theme is fine, you just take a different path than the headless folks. For classic themes the setup is the JavaScript SDK plus the Google Tag Manager integration, which in your case means adding a single Croct tag to the container you already have. No theme code changes.
The tag listens to Google's recommended events already flowing through your data layer, so product views, add-to-carts, and so on start feeding profiles immediately. Conversion-indicating events like purchases and sign-ups are tracked as conversions automatically, which matters because those become the goals your experiments measure against.
Since you are coming from Optimize, the workflow will feel familiar: variants and audiences live in a dashboard, not in your theme code.
One tag in the existing container is about my speed. Handing this to my GTM person today, thank you.
Went through the same migration in January. The part my team cared about most after Optimize died: once the tag is in, marketers publish and pause experiments and roll out winners without code changes, so the testing cadence does not depend on a dev sprint. If you are evaluating options broadly there is also a rundown of Google Optimize alternatives that covers the tradeoffs between tool classes.