Which Sales Came After a Chat? Measuring Your AI Assistant

Sooner or later, every tool on your store has to answer one question: is it paying for itself? For an AI shopping assistant, conversation counts and satisfaction ratings are useful, but they are not the number your finance spreadsheet asks for. The number that matters is sales.

AskMerra now shows the orders placed after a chat, and which of the products in those orders the assistant suggested. This article explains what you see, how it works, how it respects your shoppers' privacy, and how to read the numbers without fooling yourself.

What you see in the dashboard

On the Overview page of your dashboard, a new card called Sales through the assistant sits next to your conversation numbers:

• Sales after a chat: the total of the orders placed within 7 days after a shopper chatted with the assistant.
• Orders: how many there were.
• Suggested products sold: the order lines for products the assistant showed in the chat or added to the cart from it.
• Chats that led to an order: orders divided by conversations, so you can follow the trend over time.

Below it, the latest orders are listed one by one. Each line is marked Added from chat or Suggested in chat when it matches, and a link opens the conversation that came before the order. Reading a few of these is the fastest way to understand what your shoppers needed before they bought. The order also appears in the conversation itself, in your Conversations inbox.

Totals are shown in your shop's currency. Orders in other currencies are left out of the totals, with a note saying how many there were, so the numbers never mix euros and pounds.

How it works

The widget is already on your pages. On your order confirmation page, it reads the purchase and links it to the shopper's chat:

1. When a shopper uses the chat, the widget keeps a random chat id in their browser (no name, no email).
2. On the confirmation page, the widget reads the purchase: order number, amount, currency and products.
3. If the browser has a chat id from the last 7 days, the purchase is sent and matched to that conversation. Reloading the page does not count the order twice.

If you already use Google Analytics 4

Most shops do, and then there is nothing to set up. The widget reads the standard GA4 purchase event from the dataLayer, whether it comes from Google Tag Manager, gtag() or the GA4 apps for Shopify, WooCommerce and Magento. The older Universal Analytics enhanced ecommerce format works too.

The widget script must also be on the confirmation page. If your rules hide the chat there (many shops hide it on checkout pages), tracking still works.

If you don't

Push the purchase yourself on the confirmation page. It takes a few lines:

<script>
  window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || [];
  dataLayer.push({ ecommerce: null });
  dataLayer.push({
    event: 'purchase',
    ecommerce: {
      transaction_id: 'ORDER-1001',
      value: 64.90,
      currency: 'EUR',
      items: [{ item_id: 'SKU-123', item_name: 'Vitamin C serum', price: 29.90, quantity: 1 }],
    },
  });
</script>

Use the same product ids or SKUs as in your catalog import, so the order lines can be matched to the products the assistant suggested. You can also call AskMerra.trackPurchase() with the same object. The JavaScript API documentation has all the details.

Privacy, built in

Measuring sales should not mean tracking every visitor. Three rules are built into the widget:

• Only shoppers who chatted. If a browser has no chat id, nothing is sent and nothing is stored. Shoppers who never used the chat are invisible to this feature.
• Only with analytics consent. The widget follows Google Consent Mode from your cookie banner (analytics_storage). Without a consent signal, nothing is sent. If your banner does not use Consent Mode, you tell the widget with AskMerra.setConsent({ analytics: true }).
• No personal data. Order number, amount, currency and products. Names, emails and addresses are never read.

Purchases linked to chats follow the same retention period as your conversations and are deleted with them. List the feature under analytics in your cookie banner, and you can copy a ready-made description from our cookie policy. If you prefer not to use it, switch it off under Widget designer → Behavior → Analytics & sales.

Events for your own analytics

The same settings control a second feature: the widget pushes its own events into your dataLayer, so you can use them in Google Tag Manager and GA4 under your own consent setup.

• askmerra_open, with how the chat was opened (launcher, your own button or the proactive greeting)
• askmerra_message_sent
• askmerra_product_click, with the product in GA4 ecommerce format
• askmerra_add_to_cart, with the product, currency and value

The text of messages is never pushed. With these events you can, for example, build a GA4 funnel from opening the chat to purchase, or compare your own segments of shoppers who used the chat and shoppers who did not.

Reading the numbers honestly

"After a chat" is not the same as "because of a chat". Some shoppers would have bought anyway, and asked a question on the way. Others bought days later after the assistant answered the one doubt that stopped them. A 7-day window counts both, and no window can tell them apart perfectly.

So treat the numbers as a strong signal, not as proof:

• Watch the trend. A rising share of chats that lead to an order after you improve your FAQ or product data says more than any single month.
• Look at suggested products sold. When the products the assistant recommended end up in the basket, the chat clearly did its job.
• Read the conversations behind orders. They show which questions come right before a purchase. Those are the questions worth answering well everywhere on your store, not only in the chat.
• Compare like with like. If you use the GA4 events, compare shoppers who opened the chat with similar shoppers who did not, over the same period.

Getting started

Sales tracking is available on every plan. If your store already sends purchases to GA4, the card fills up as soon as the first shopper who chatted places an order. Our guide on installing AskMerra on Shopify and WooCommerce covers the widget setup, and you can create your account or book a demo to see the numbers on your own store.