404 Page Tracking in eCommerce: 5 Reasons It Matters

404 Page not found.

Not the end of the world. But ignored 404s quietly leak revenue, indexation, and link equity – and on a large eCommerce catalog they pile up faster than most teams realize.

So what do those errors actually mean for an online store, and what should you do with the ones you catch?

We’ll answer both. At the end, you’ll find a Looker Studio template you can plug into your own analytics in under five minutes – plus parallel paths if you live in GA4 or Google Search Console instead.

What is a 404 page?

A 404 page is the response a server returns when a browser requests a URL that doesn’t exist on your site – a deleted product, a mistyped slug, a stale internal link. 404 is part of the family of HTTP status codes servers use to tell browsers and search engines what happened with the request. On an eCommerce site, the four most common causes are deleted products, slug changes on category pages, broken internal links from old marketing campaigns, and inbound links pointing at URLs that never existed.

Do 404 errors negatively impact SEO?

404 errors are a normal part of running a site. You’re allowed to delete products you no longer sell. You can rename a category. You can’t stop a customer from mistyping a URL. Search engines understand this.

Google’s current guidance on the question is straightforward:

Google doesn’t use the content from URLs that return 4xx status codes. If a URL was previously used but is now returning a 4xx status code, Google systems will stop using the URL over time.

Google Search Central, HTTP and network errors (last updated 2026-02-04)

So 404 errors per se do not negatively impact SEO. What they do is drop the URL out of Google’s index over time – which is fine when the URL really should be gone, and a problem when it’s a page you still want to rank. That’s why monitoring matters more than the raw count. Even though 404 errors do not directly hurt your eCommerce store in terms of SEO, monitoring them surfaces the issues that quietly do – broken internal links, missing redirects after a migration, and indexation leaks on pages that still convert. It’s the same hygiene work that earns you a clean technical SEO audit, and a logical companion to your wider SEO efforts.

Why is 404 page tracking important for eCommerce?

Treat 404 tracking the way you treat any technical SEO check – as a continuous monitoring task, not an annual chore. The payoffs split into five concrete patterns, each worth a fix.

1. You want to closely monitor important pages

If important pages on your eCommerce store start returning 404, you should waste no time finding out why. If Google encounters the same 404 on a crawl-priority URL for long enough, it will drop the URL from the index. Top-converting product detail pages, your highest-traffic category pages, and any URL you’ve spent money sending paid traffic to are the ones you can’t afford to lose silently. Continuous monitoring catches these within a day, not a quarter.

2. Very high volumes of 404 pages can point to an anomaly

A handful of 404s a day is normal. A sudden spike isn’t. If your analytics report shows daily 404 volume jumping out of its usual band, something has broken – a faulty internal-linking change, a bad deploy, a sitemap pointing at URLs that no longer exist, or a redirect rule that didn’t make the cut on go-live. You don’t want your customers to be greeted with a 404 page on their way to checkout, and you definitely don’t want Google crawling through thousands of them at once.

Regularly monitoring your 404s lets you address these issues as quickly as possible.

The two graphs below show exactly what this looks like in the wild. A Magento site we worked on was averaging around 200 daily 404 errors before go-live. Immediately after the new site launched, daily errors jumped to as much as 4,000 and held an average of around 2,000 – a 10× spike that pointed straight at a redirect-mapping gap. Tracking caught it on day one. Without the dashboard, it would have bled traffic for weeks.

The same pattern applies on Shopify replatforms, headless rebuilds, and any large URL restructure – the platform changes, but the failure mode and the dashboard signal are identical.

3. 404 pages can be put to good use

If you’re not happy to see 404 pages on your site, your customers aren’t either. They clicked a link expecting something of value. A blank “404 Page not found” is the fastest way to lose them. So turn that potentially negative moment into a useful one.

A custom 404 page can carry navigation, a search box, a promo block, or links to the pages users were probably trying to reach. Look at how Headspace and Popsugar do this – a small visual nod plus shortcuts back into the site.

Your custom 404 page should match your category mix, but for most stores it’s worth surfacing:

• Homepage
• A site search box
• Most-viewed category or collection page
• Best-selling products
• Customer-service / contact entry point

On Shopify, the same logic applies – Shopify themes ship with an editable 404 template, and our Shopify SEO checklist walks through the platform-specific fixes. On headless storefronts, the 404 is a route in your front-end framework. The principle is identical – the implementation lives in your Next.js, Nuxt, or Remix routing layer.

A custom 404 keeps users engaged. Instead of bouncing on an ugly error message, they appreciate that you’ve thought about the edge case and may choose to stay. From there, the funnel is yours to recover.

4. A 404 could be better as a 301

A 404 says “this page doesn’t exist.” A 301 says “this page has moved – here’s where to find it.” If you have inbound traffic or referrals landing on a 404, a 301 redirect is almost always the better answer.

It’s normal to change the URL of pages over time – for SEO, branding, campaign, or merchandising reasons. But if you’ve put a URL out in the world, customers will keep arriving on it. If you change the URL of any page, make a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one. That preserves the inbound traffic and the link equity flowing into the old URL – it transfers to the new one instead of disappearing.

A few high-impact 301 patterns on eCommerce sites:

• Discontinued products – redirect to the replacement product, or to the category page when no direct replacement exists.
• Renamed categories – redirect every old URL to the new one (not just the first one you remembered).
• Common URL misspellings with measurable traffic – redirect the misspelling to the legitimate URL.
• Post-migration legacy URLs – catch the long tail with regex redirects, not one-by-one rules.

Important. You might be tempted to 301-redirect every 404 on the site to your homepage. Don’t. Your homepage will get flagged by Google as a soft 404, and it will affect how Google indexes the rest of your site. Blanket-redirecting is a habit that looks tidy in a spreadsheet and reads as deceptive to a crawler.

5. It might be best to restore specific 404 pages

If a 404 page still gets meaningful traffic, the cleanest answer might be to bring it back.

You can redirect users to a related page, as covered above. But if no clean alternative exists, or if demand for the old page is still high, preserve the SEO value by restoring the original page – fresh content, same URL. This is especially worth doing for evergreen content pages, top-of-funnel guides that earned backlinks, and product pages tied to recurring search demand.

How to track 404 pages – Looker Studio, GA4, and Google Search Console

The original dashboard for this article was built in Google Data Studio. Google rebranded the product to Looker Studio in 2022, but the template still works – you just paste it in and connect your own data source.

Path 1: The Looker Studio template

To copy the template and connect your own data:

1. Click the three dots on the top right of the template. Select Make a copy.

2. Select your Google Analytics property as the New Data Source.

3. Edit the filter by entering the page title you use for your 404 error pages.

4. Check the rest of the filters to confirm the same page title is used across the report.

5. You now have a working 404 dashboard in Looker Studio.

Path 2: GA4 (no extra tooling required)

If you’d rather stay inside GA4:

1. Go to Reports → Engagement → Pages and screens.
2. Add a filter on Page title that matches your 404 template (for most stores this is something like “Page Not Found” or “404 – Page not found”).
3. Sort by Views to see which URLs are racking up 404 sessions.
4. Pivot on Page referrer to see where the traffic is coming from – usually a mix of internal links, old campaigns, and external backlinks.

For continuous monitoring, save the report as a library card or build a custom exploration with the same filter.

Path 3: Google Search Console (crawler view)

GSC tells you which 404s Google is actually finding when it crawls:

1. Open Indexing → Pages → Why pages aren’t indexed.
2. Click into the “Not found (404)” row to see the list of URLs Google encountered.
3. Cross-reference with Crawl stats (Settings → Crawl stats) to spot 404 spikes against the wider crawl pattern.
4. Use URL Inspection on any specific 404 URL to confirm Google’s last crawl status and to request reindexing after you’ve put a 301 or restored the page.

The GSC view is what matters for indexation. The GA4 and Looker Studio view is what matters for user-impact prioritization. Run both in parallel – they answer different questions.

Frequently asked questions

Do 404 errors hurt SEO?

Not on their own. A 404 tells Google the URL no longer exists, and Google drops it from the index over time. That’s expected behavior. What hurts SEO is leaving 404s in place on URLs that still get traffic, still have backlinks, or still appear in your internal links and sitemap – those quietly cost you sessions and crawl budget.

How do I track 404 errors in Google Analytics 4?

Go to Reports → Engagement → Pages and screens, then filter on the page title your 404 template returns (commonly “Page Not Found” or “404”). Sort by views to surface the URLs racking up the most error traffic, and pivot on page referrer to see where users are coming from. Save the view as a custom report for ongoing monitoring.

What is a soft 404 and how is it different from a regular 404?

A regular 404 returns the HTTP 404 status code – the server says the page doesn’t exist. A soft 404 returns a 200 (success) status code but shows error-like content (“Page not found”, an empty category page, a blank product listing). Google’s crawler can’t trust the 200, so it classifies the URL as a soft 404 and may treat it the way it treats a real 404. The fix is to make sure pages that don’t exist return a real 404 – or, if the content exists but is thin, fix the content. It’s the same trap that creates duplicate content issues – Google sees a successful response, but the content doesn’t match the URL it indexed.

When should I 301 redirect a 404 page vs. restore it?

301 redirect when there’s a clear replacement page or the old URL just changed slug – that preserves traffic and link equity in a single move. Restore when the page still has meaningful demand, earned backlinks, or no clean redirect target exists. Default to 301, and restore selectively when the data warrants it.

What’s a good eCommerce 404 page?

A 404 that does work for the visitor. Surface a site search box, the most-viewed category or collection, best-selling products, and a contact entry point. Keep the brand voice. Don’t blanket-redirect to the homepage – Google will flag it as a soft 404, and the user still doesn’t get where they were trying to go.

How do I find 404 errors in Google Search Console?

Open Indexing → Pages, then click into the “Not found (404)” row to see the list of URLs Google encountered. Cross-reference with Crawl stats (Settings → Crawl stats) to spot spikes. Use URL Inspection on individual URLs to confirm Google’s last crawl status and to request reindexing once you’ve fixed the issue.

How often should I check 404s on a large catalog?

Daily for sites over 100k URLs or anything in a post-migration window. Weekly for mid-size catalogs. Monthly at the absolute minimum – by then, a redirect-mapping gap has already cost you a quarter of crawl budget on URLs that don’t exist.

If you’d rather not bolt the 404 dashboard together yourself – or if you want 404 hygiene reviewed as part of a wider SEO and UX audit – talk to our SEO team. We’ll find the leaks, prioritize the fixes by traffic and revenue impact, and ship the redirects, custom 404 page, and monitoring setup as one workstream.

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