View GA statistics of a multi-currency store on PrestaShop with currencyCode

Although your store on PrestaShop supports the possibility of a payment in several different currencies, the statistics on orders in Google Analytics are displayed for only one of them and are therefore not correct. So how do you arrange to provide the most accurate information possible? Use currencyCode. We’ll show you how.

You don’t pay for running an online store on PrestaShop

PrestaShop is an open-source solution for online stores that is used by thousands of users from 160 countries around the world. Shoppers do not have to interfere with its kernel code or templates. In its administration, they effectively set everything from URLs to individual tags and other details. It also has many modules (some are free, others paid) that you only install and use right away, so you save a lot of time with development and testing. PrestaShop is fast, which means that an inexpensive hosting provider is enough.

How Google Analytics works

Google Analytics is a tool that analyzes website traffic and evaluates its success. To find out useful information about visitors to your site, you need to insert a tracker into its source code (Mergado Pack can do this function automatically, which will save you time). Using this javascript code, which the user loads along with the content of your site, Google Analytics collects information about the displayed page and the user. GA then processes them into comprehensive visits and displays them as statistics in reports.

What is the role of currencyCode

Most of the available solutions for implementing Google Analytics send order data, including the currencyCode, to an online store. If you do not use the solution that sends the currencyCode, GA will not know in which currency the order has been created. It, therefore, displays it in the main currency that you set in GA.

Example

In the online store, you support payment in CZK and EUR. The customer creates an order for 400 EUR. If the GA script does not send the currencyCode, the GA displays the value of the transaction as 400 CZK because it has a currency set to display CZK.

Both orders were the same product at the same price. This significant difference is caused by the outdated exchange rate in PrestaShop. Therefore, it is necessary to update the exchange rate in the store. You can also set up automatic updates from PrestaShop servers. Exchange rate differences may still exist, as Google and PrestaShop may have a different source for updating exchange rates. The actual sales figures will slightly differ from those in GA. However, this difference will be significantly lower when you monitor if the individual courses are current.

In the case of downloading order statistics, we were unable to determine where Google Analytics is taking the exchange rates from. We assume that it uses the same service as, for example, currency conversion in search.

Do you want to ease the worries of running a multi-currency store? Use the Mergado Pack for PrestaShop. Its e‑commerce measurement function using GA sends the currencyCode automatically. Just activate it. You can choose from classic measurement, e‑commerce measurement, and extended e‑commerce.

That’s it. We recently looked at the VAT settings in WooCommerce. We will soon continue in a series of articles that will advise you on how to customize your business on e‑commerce platforms.

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