If you filter your Shopify orders by the Lantern Quiz tag, you'll often get a different number from Orders in Lantern's Reporting → Analytics. Both numbers are right. They just count different things, and this article explains what each one includes.
The short version
The tag goes on any order from a customer who answered at least one quiz question.
Lantern's Orders only counts orders from customers who finished the quiz and reached the Results Page.
Shopify lists orders by the day they were placed. Lantern groups them by the day the customer took the quiz.
Because of the first point, the tag count is usually the higher of the two, and that's expected.
How an order gets the tag
As soon as a customer answers their first question, Lantern links the quiz to that customer's Shopify cart. Any order placed from that cart gets the tag, as long as order tagging is turned on for the quiz. It doesn't matter whether they finished the quiz, which products they bought, or whether they added them to the cart from the quiz or from your store.
The tag name is set per quiz. If you renamed it, filter your orders by your own tag name instead. You can read more in How Lantern Order Tags Work.
How Lantern counts Orders and Sales
Lantern counts an order in Orders when it's linked to a quiz in the same way as the tag, and that customer reached the Results Page.
Lantern also counts a Buy it now order, which skips the cart, when it has a single product and was placed from the same internet connection as a finished quiz in the previous two days.
A few more details:
Each order is counted once, even if the customer took more than one quiz.
Sales is the full value of those orders, not only the recommended products.
Orders, Sales and Average Order Value are grouped by the day the customer took the quiz, not the day they placed the order.
Quizzes you preview from the Lantern admin aren't counted.
Why the tag count is usually higher
The customer didn't finish the quiz. They answered a question or two, then kept shopping on their own. Their order gets the tag but doesn't count as a Lantern order.
The dates don't line up. A customer who takes the quiz on September 30 and orders on October 2 shows up in September in Lantern and in October in Shopify.
Several quizzes share one tag. Every quiz uses the Lantern Quiz tag unless you change it, but Lantern's Analytics can show one quiz at a time. Give each quiz its own tag if you want to compare them one by one.
Why Lantern can count an order that has no tag
Buy it now orders. Lantern matches them as described above, but they never pass through the cart, so they can't be tagged.
Order tagging is off for that quiz, or the quiz uses a different tag name.
How to compare the two numbers
In Lantern, go to Reporting → Sessions, choose the quiz and date range, and click Export to CSV. Every session that led to an order lists its order name.
In Shopify, filter your orders by the quiz's tag for the same dates, plus a few extra days at the end to catch customers who ordered later.
Match the two lists by order name. Orders that only appear in Shopify are almost always from customers who started the quiz but didn't reach the Results Page.
If the numbers still don't add up, contact our support team with the quiz name and the date range, and we'll take a look!