Purchases not showing up in GA4

Recently we were auditing a GA4 account but no purchase data was showing up.

The natural way for anybody to debug that is to make sure

1. Purchase event is firing

2. Make sure it is sending the right parameters

3. Make sure it is sending to the right GA4 property

4. and so on.

And that’s exactly were the first steps. This setup was a bit more complicated because purchase data was sent via server-side tracking. So we did check the server-side setup as well and it looked fine.

Everything looked fine. However no data was showing up in GA4.

Our default audit setup also includes sending the GA4 data to BigQuery. In this case the client had that already setup so we could see the past data.

And guess what? The purchase data was in BigQuery but not in GA4.

So GA4 was hiding that data, which happens in case of thresholding but there there was no thresholding message shown in GA4.

So BigQuery confirmed that indeed all the purchase data was being sent to GA4 and there was no issue with purchase tags, trigger or values. Having this knowledge shifted our focus from debugging tag firing and parameters to why GA4 is withholding that information.

Further digging into BigQuery data showed us the reason.

There was an issue with user id setup.

Now I can’t go into every single detail because every setup in different and every issue is different but the point of this post is to tell you the important of looking at the raw data because aggregated data in GA4 does not tell you the full story.

Ability to send GA4 data to BigQuery is one of the best features of GA4 . Don’t let it go waste. Having the data in BigQuery gives deeper insights and debugging capabilities that are just not possible with GA4 interface.

So if you haven’t yet started with BigQuery then do it right away. You will be amazed how much time and effort you save while debugging GA4.

(Note: I do cover such cases and go over the details of how we solved them in Optizent Inner Circle Membership).

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