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Inconsistency in Total Revenue Metric Calculation with Added Dimensions and Metrics
Hey there! I’ve been working on a report in Google Analytics 4 that exports the total revenue for a specific property. I’ve been cross-checking the report from the API and the UI and something funky’s going on with the UI.
I built a report there using the “session default channel group”, “device category”, “session campaign”, and “session source” to get total revenue, which came to a neat $524k.
Then things got weird. I added “new users” to the mix and the summarized total revenue shrunk down to $520k. I thought, okay, strange, but let’s see what happens if I add some more parameters into the equation. So, I added “Date” and the metrics “Total Users”, “Ecommerce purchases”, “Sessions” and “Event Value” and bam – the total revenue got slimmer again, sitting at $516k now.
I’m scratching my head here – why’s this happening? And how do I figure out what the real total revenue is? Thanks in advance for your help!
I was hoping that the Total Revenue value would stay consistent, you know. Or am I missing something here?
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2 Replies
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It sounds like you’re encountering issues related to scope and data sampling in Google Analytics 4. The total revenue might be changing because of the way GA4 calculates metrics based on the dimensions you’ve selected. When you added new dimensions like “new users” or “Date,” GA4 calculates the metrics again for each unique combination of dimension values. This process might lead to internal data sampling or exclusion of some data points leading to the change in total revenue. This typically happens when the dimension added has a different scope. For instance, session-scoped dimensions, like ‘device category’, relate to data within individual sessions, while user-scoped dimensions, like ‘new users’, relate to data across all sessions by individual users. A mix of these can result in discrepancies.
To identify the correct total revenue, you may want to test your metrics in different configurations to see how they are impacted. Also, consider the scope of each dimension and metric you’re using. For a robust approach, you could pull your raw data into a database and query it directly, bypassing potential GA4 sampling issues.
Remember, the key is understanding that adding more dimensions essentially forces Google Analytics to finer segmentations, potentially lowering some aggregated numbers due to different scopes. So the total revenue isn’t necessarily decreasing, but is rather being re-distributed across the smaller, finer-grained segments of data.
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This sounds like an issue with Google Analytics adding additional filters when you’re selecting new parameters. Each time you add a new dimension, it can potentially limit the scope of your data, which might explain why your total revenue figure is decreasing. You might need to check each parameter to find out how it’s limiting your data. Hope this helps!
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