GA4 Tip: Ecommerce Currency Gotcha

Photo by John McArthur on Unsplash

Picture this scenario:

1. In your GA4 property, you set the “Currency displayed as” to Australian Dollar (AUD)
2. You then record an ecommerce transaction on your website with:
   - Currency = AUD
   - Value = 1000
3. A few days later, you look at the GA4 ecommerce report and see that the transaction is being recorded as AUD 999.90

Why is this so?

Well, this is because in default ecommerce reports, GA4 does this (annoying) thing whereby:

• [At data recording time] Ecommerce value is converted to and stored as USD value, using Google’s own currency exchange rates on that day
• [At reporting time] Ecommerce value is then converted from the USD value BACK to the AUD value (as per GA4 property currency settings), using Google’s own historical currency exchange rates

We can better understand why when we look at the data schema in BigQuery:

GA4 default reports seem to be using these USD metrics only

However, we don’t understand why it has to be done this way..

For most data analysis work, this quirk should not present a big problem in getting the insights that you need.

If you need really accurate values in your reports, you can:

• Hope GA4 to make the original metrics available, and an option to make them the default in all ecommerce reports
• Do your reports via BigQuery

Sparkline aims to provide data accuracy, comprehension and consolidation, and most importantly, tangible insights for businesses. Get in touch if you’d like to find out more about GA4.