Multi-currency tracking from Google

Web giant Google has introduced multi-currency tracking to its suite of services aimed at ecommerce businesses – what does it mean to you?

When you’re running a retail business online, expanding your enterprise to an international market is easier than a brick-and-mortar business. Ecommerce, by its very nature, is global. But it does still come with a lot of complications.

Google knows this as well as anyone and having listened to feedback from the millions of businesses that use its analytics platform, the search engine giant introduced multi-currency tracking in February this year.

The new service allows users to track transaction metrics in multiple currencies within a single web property. Results such as total revenue, tax, shipping and handling costs will be calculated regardless of which currency is being used and then converted to your own currency. Google will use the daily exchange rate from the previous day to create results in your main currency.

At the moment 31 currencies are being supported by the added feature. Conducting analysis across an international customer base has just gotten easier.

“Google Analytics’ new multi-currency feature increases sales metric accuracy for AllPoster.com,” writes David Tjen, Director of Analytics at AllPosters.com on Google’s blog.

“As an international brand, the AllPosters family of sites supports 20 currencies across 25 countries. Previously, manual adjustments were required before we could read sales metrics in Google Analytics when we had transactions with large currency conversion ratios to the US dollar, such as the Mexican Peso and Japanese Yen.

“The simple code update solves the issue by automatically converting all transactions to the primary currency on each site, providing sales metrics that allow us to make faster decisions with our web analytics data.”

Here’s how to use the new feature

It’s a two part action to get this service up and running on your analytics.

First you need to make sure your ‘master’ currency is correct on your analytics profile settings. You’ve probably already done this is you’re using analytics already but check it is correct. There’s a drop down menu with ‘Currency displayed as’ before it. Choose your currency from there.

Next you need to change a piece of code on your receipts page to specify the currency code of each of your foreign currencies that you need to convert.

This must be above the _trackTrans. The ecommerce plugin allows you to specify the local currency of the transaction using the currencyCode field.

If the currencies specified in the original transaction and your profile settings are different, Google will convert for you.

Click the link for full instructions on Google’s Developers’ blog.