We are facing a strange issue with our WooCommerce event tracking. Recently, we set up e-commerce event tracking using the Stape plugin for WordPress. There seems to be something wrong with the revenue we see in WooCommerce compared to GA4.
I’m struggling to find the cause and thought someone here might be able to help. The other day, I saw a purchase event in GA4’s real-time view, and for that purchase, the “value” parameter was showing 4400, which is the correct amount. However, when I checked the same purchase (with the transaction ID) in GA4 Explore today, it shows 564.17, which is way off from the actual purchase revenue.
Earlier, I placed an order while having both GTM Preview and GA4 DebugView open side by side. Everything worked fine at that moment, but when I checked the details in GA4 with the transaction ID the following day, it showed a completely wrong revenue amount.
I’ve attached snapshots of a recent purchase, which had 4400 in revenue but shows 564.17 in GA4 standard reports and Explore. Can someone please guide me on how this might be happening? We’ve been using Stape’s WP/Shopify plugins for a while now and haven’t encountered this kind of glitch before.
Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
It looks very strange, if in preview mode you see that the value is passed correctly, but then it changes in GA4 I can only see two potential reasons:
Problem with currency, or the event is passing incorrect currency, or GA4 settings use a different currency for the property. So in effect GA4 is just converting the amount into a different currency.
A purchase with the same transaction id is sent again, e.g. from another source or via Measurement protocol. Thus it can use the payload of another event (but in this case the event count parameter of this purchase will not be 1).
The issue was that transactions on the site happen in $HKD, but the property was set up with the LA timezone and USD currency (which, I guess, is the default). I corrected the reporting timezone and currency setup, and voila, everything works perfectly fine now.
One last thing I don’t understand between WooCommerce and the existing GA4 setup is that I see revenue for even “On Hold”, “Cancelled”, “Pending Payment,” etc., orders as well. I thought it would only show revenue for the “Completed” order status. Wouldn’t this skew our data? Because sometimes, we see “Pending Payment” and “Cancelled” orders included in the GA4 purchase revenue.
Data layer sends an event to the thank you page after an order has been placed. This data is sent immediately to the platforms you have configured, but in the future the order status can change or be cancelled of course - for this you can send a refund event via webhooks on the basis of which GA4 will change the revenue and order statistics.
There is more information here: Mide el comercio electrónico | Google Analytics | Google for Developers
