Which traffic sources bring paying customers?

To know which sources bring paying customers, GA4 has to see the sale: send a purchase event (or count a thank-you page), stop payment pages taking the credit, then read purchases by session source and landing page. Stripe tells you how much money came in; GA4 tells you where buyers came from.

The setup, in orderCopy Anchor Link

Read it in GA4Copy Anchor Link

Reports → Acquisition → Traffic acquisition, then choose your purchase key event in the Key events column (the dropdown under its heading). Switch the first column between Session source / medium and Session default channel group. For pages, use Reports → Engagement → Landing page.

What it can and can't tell youCopy Anchor Link

• It shows the source of the visit where the sale happened. If someone read your blog from Google, came back a week later by typing your address and bought, GA4's session view credits Direct.
• Not every buyer is tracked. Buyers who block GA4 still pay. Stripe's total will be higher than GA4's.
• Revenue in GA4 comes from your event, not from Stripe. If they disagree, Stripe is right about money.

So use GA4 to compare sources with each other, and Stripe for your real revenue.

Avoid made-up numbersCopy Anchor Link

It's tempting to divide revenue by visitors per source to get "revenue per visitor from X". Unless GA4 actually recorded the sale for that source, that number is a guess. Keep to sales GA4 recorded, and revenue Stripe recorded.

RelatedCopy Anchor Link

• Create a read-only Stripe key
• What counts as a sale
• First user source vs session source