Are
PayPal and other payment providers among the top referral sources in your
Google Analyticsaccount
with the most revenue? f so, you should not ignore this, but take action. A clean analysis of your traffic sources and, consequently, a targeted management of your marketing spend is not possible in this way. However, there is a quick and easy solution.
Recognizing the Problem in Google Analytics
Recently, while looking at the Google Analytics numbers of an online shop, I stumbled upon something: 50% of its revenue was generated through
referrals. Since he is very active in
Google Ads and
Facebook-Marketing and his backlink profile is still rather thin, this seemed a bit strange. A closer look at the referral sources showed that while the largest share of referrer traffic came from normal third-party sites, these did not bring any revenue. ll transactions were attributed to three sources:
- paypal.com
- sofort.com
- paydirekt.de
Thus, the
payment providers PayPal, Sofortüberweisung and Paydirekt were supposedly the most successful referral sources of the online shop—something wasn’t right here!
The Cause
You probably know this from the user’s perspective. You have reached an online shop through one of the following ways:
- Google Ads advertisments
- Link in a newsletter
- Link on a coupon site
- Facebook-Post
- …
Google Analytics assigns you as a user and your session to the corresponding source.
Google Analytics assigns you as a user and your session to the corresponding source. You like some articles that you add to your shopping cart. You go through the order process, select PayPal as the payment method in the checkout, and then either your PayPal account opens in the same window or in a pop-up. Here you authorize the payment and then return to the online shop, which thanks you for your purchase. From Google Analytics’ perspective, you leave the online shop for a moment, so your session is considered ended. Then, a redirect back to the shop occurs, a new session begins, and now Google Analytics attributes your visit to the referral source PayPal. The original source is overwritten.
What Are the Consequences for Your Google Analytics Numbers?
At first glance, you might be tempted to dismiss this as trivial. The revenue is still generated. However, this inaccuracy
distorts your ongoing reporting. The numbers in Google Analytics increasingly deviate from the evaluations of Google Ads, your email marketing, or social media tool. Now unpleasant questions from your boss arise. Maybe he even wants to stop the engagement on Facebook. Nothing comes out of it anyway, even though you put so much time into it.
And if not, then the topic will hit you at the latest when it comes to
budget planning, and you have to decide which online marketing channel you will invest more or less money in next year. The basis for this is likely to be the previous development of the marketing channels, which you can no longer read cleanly. You can hardly allocate marketing budget to PayPal, as they will not do any marketing for your online shop…
How to Fix the Redirect Problem with PayPal
In your business account on www.paypal.com, you need to activate the
“Automatic Return” option and specify the URL of the page within your checkout to which users should be redirected after payment. Probably the thank you or confirmation page.
Add the utm parameter ‘?utm_nooverride=1’ to the URL. This prevents the original source from being overwritten. It looks something like this:
https://www.adojo-beispielshop.de/danke?utm_nooverride=1
If you use
Google Universal Analytics, the utm parameter is not needed. Here you just need to add paypal.com to the
referral exclusion list in the admin area of your Analytics account.
Similarly simple solutions exist for other payment providers.
