If there is one thing digital marketeers across the board dislike immensely, is looking into the source/medium report in Google Analytics and finding this – paypal/referral. The channel by which the user reached our website and then made a purchase is not reported on and instead the entire session is attributed to paypal or any other third party payment gateway that is used.
Take for example the information shown in this image. Here revenue of approx $11000 is attributed to paypal, which as any ppc specialist knows, is not the entire story. Which channel did the user come from initially?
Adding paypal.com/referral to the referral exclusion list works to some extent, but it is not a fool proof method, as it only decreases the number of time it shows up within the source/medium report but does not completely erase it from the report.
So what can we do? How are we able to look past the source/medium report to find what we are looking for?
Here at Convomax, we use a few different approaches to circumvent this issue with paypal showing up within the source/medium report.
For the purpose of this post, I have used a year’s worth of data – 12th April 2015 – 12th April 2016, from a small to medium e-commerce website and arriving at the answer took me about 30 minutes in total.
Let’s get to it –
Within the Google Analytics interface, we will use the conversions>mcf>top conversion paths report.
Choose the date range you want to work with
You will get a report that looks like this
After exporting the data, this is what you have
We will now filter the data to show only those items that have the word “referral” within column A. Filtering data is extremely easy. Make sure you select the data from row two – column c right till your data ends.
In Libre office – the office suite software we use, the filtering option is within the data menu in the header – Data>Filter>Standard Filter
The data filtered will look like this
Now, depending on the attribution model you want to use, we generally use last click attribution model, which we modify to mean the last click before the referral, we get data that looks like this
With this information, I have a pretty good idea of approximately how much revenue should be attributed to my paid, organic and direct revenue tabs instead of under paypal.com.
While this report does have its drawbacks, we use it for a quick, fast and easy look at which channels were engaged just before a new session was triggered by paypal.com.
Let us know if you found this helpful or if you can think of any other way to get this information. We’d love to hear from you