GA4 Misattributing Sales to PayPal? Here's the Real Fix.

Author

Himanshu Sharma
November 20, 2024

💀 ☠ Is GA4 attributing a lot of sales to PayPal.com instead of the original referrer? The Fix is not 'List unwanted referrals'. It is something else. 👇

When you exclude paypal. com as a referral source, GA4 does not automatically assign the sale to "direct traffic."

Instead, it looks back at the user's journey and attributes the traffic/sale to the last non-excluded referrer in the session.

But if the last non-excluded referrer is not the original referrer, you won't get accurate attribution data in your GA4 reports.

For example, if the original referrer is Google Ads but the last non-excluded referrer is Google organic search, then organic search is attributed sales instead of Google Ads.

If the last non-excluded referrer is direct, it would be ignored unless the entire conversion path consisted of direct traffic.

GA4 would look further back in the user's journey to find the last non-direct, non-excluded touchpoint to attribute the conversion.

So adding paypal.com to the referral exclusion list (aka 'List unwanted referrals') might improve the accuracy of referral data (provided the last non-excluded referrer is also the original referrer). Still, it does not guarantee 100% fix all the time.

What you really need to do is to use the direct payment gateway.

Stripe and PayPal are an example of payment gateways.

Many businesses use PayPal and other third-party payment gateways to accept online payments.

But this can create attribution issues in GA4.

Whenever a customer leaves your website to make a payment via a third-party payment gateway and later returns to your website from the gateway website, GA4 often attributes sales to the payment gateway instead of the original traffic source.

This is quite common in the case of PayPal.

You can often find PayPal.com being attributed traffic and sales instead of the original referrer in GA4.

This happens because when users are redirected to PayPal website to complete a transaction and then return to your website, GA4 often treats PayPal as the referral source for that session.

The best way to track original referrals using third-party payment gateways is not to use external payment gateways.

There are two types of payment gateways:

1) External Payment Gateways (like PayPal, Amazon Pay etc).

2) Direct Payment Gateways (like PayPal Pro, Stripe etc)

If you use an external payment gateway, your customers must leave your website to complete a transaction.

But if you use direct payment gateways, your customers can complete transactions without leaving your website.

>> Consider using only a direct payment gateway.

It will cost you more than an external gateway but help you minimise self-referral and misattribution issues in your GA4 reports.