Dealing with multiple Google Analytics accounts and currencies is something international ecommerce companies have to deal with on a daily basis. With some organizations tied to an official currency exchange rate constantly varying and different than those set in Google Analytics 360, working with multiple Google Analytics accounts, currencies, and maintaining dashboards, can be a challenge.
One of our customers, ASICS corporation, an international athletics equipment company, operates over 40 websites in 8 currencies bringing their many brands to the world online, and through various marketplaces. They use Analytics Canvas to provide dashboards that combine multiple currencies, and which can be viewed in USD by employees in the US, in EUR by employees in Europe, and Japanese Yen by employees in Japan, etc.
In some cases our Global Accounting team sets conversion rates that are slightly different than those set by Google Finance in Google Analytics. Working with multiple Google Analytics Views and currencies, and maintaining dashboards where everyone feels confident about currency conversions can be a handful.
Jose Uzcategui
Analytics & Optimization Lead, ASICS Corporation
Analytics Canvas takes worldwide sales from all the websites, and combines them into one report, where it is possible to select a currency and see the sales trend summary across all the websites. This dashboard can be used by regional offices and by the headquarters. Each of the offices will be viewing data in their local currency.
To give you an idea of what’s possible – this is sample set of data visualized with Tableau:
With Analytics Canvas, such a dashboard can be implemented and set to refresh automatically. We’ll give you an overview here, but for more detail and a detailed step by step please don’t hesitate to request a demo- when we understand your specific needs we can show you exactly how Analytics Canvas can help.
There are 3 key steps to get a dashboard like this: getting the data from multiple Google Analytics profiles; converting to multiple currencies; and automating the dashboard to refresh every hour.
Getting data for multiple Google Analytics views and currencies
It is easy to combine data from multiple Google Analytics accounts using Analytics Canvas. Select New Source > Google Analytics > Core Reporting. Sign in to Google Analytics and authorize Analytics Canvas to get the GA and Google Sheets data for you, if you haven’t done so already.
Check the Google Analytics accounts and profiles to include in your query (selecting profiles from multiple accounts is also possible). Select Create One Block to combine data from all the profiles. Click Next.
Create a query to select metrics and dimensions for your dashboard. In our case, we are using: currency, medium, sessions, revenue, transactions, and items per purchase. You can also include additional data, such as which web property and profile the data came from.
Converting to multiple currencies using set or current exchange rate
When you are importing ecommerce data from multiple accounts in multiple currencies, you need conversion rates to be able to aggregate the data. At this step, we will bring in the currency exchange rate data. In Analytics Canvas, you can bring in your internal exchange rate that your company is storing internally in databases and files, or use the near real time exchange rate available through Google Sheets.
At this point, you are probably wondering, how is this different from local currency setting in Google Analytics enhanced ecommerce? And this is a good question! If you are analyzing historical trends and want to keep consistency with other reports, you may need to establish your internal currency conversion rates and use it with your Google Analytics analysis. Why? As Brian Clifton pointed out, multi-currency setting in GA is a flawed feature. If you use multi-currency support in GA, your ecommerce performance indicators will be influenced by the fluctuation of currency exchange rates.
You can import the currency conversion rate that your company is using internally from a flat file, Excel sheet or a database. Analytics Canvas connects to various databases, including Access, SQL, MySQL, Oracle, Teradata and others.
If you want near real time exchange rate data, you can pull this in from Google Finance using our Google Sheets connector. We have created a Google Sheet that provides conversion rates for all the currencies supported by Google Analytics. It is set to refresh every minute. It takes only the most recent exchange rate, so your analysis will not be affected by currency fluctuations. Feel free to copy it to your Google Drive.
To connect to our Google Sheet, select New Source > Google Spreadsheet. Paste the link to our Google Sheet and click OK. You can use a Join Block to join Google Analytics data and Google Sheets data by currency. Once that has been done, you can convert currency data to any currency that is present in the Google Sheet, using simple calculations such as [itemRevenue]*[Exchange]. You can output the resulting data into Excel, Tableau or other reporting tools and use it to produce a dashboard like the example above.
Automating reports
You can automate this dashboard to refresh at the desired frequency, using Analytics Canvas Automation Wizard. On the main tool bar, select Automation > Automation Wizard. You can also set Analytics Canvas to email you a notification every time the data updates. Automation Wizard will create a batch file on your computer. You can use this file in Windows Scheduler to schedule a regular update of your dashboard.
You can learn more about automation in this tutorial.
Contact to us if you have any questions regarding the implementation of multiple currency conversions. We are always available to assist with this and any other Google Analytics questions you may have.