This feature is only available in the Pro version of Independent Analytics.
There are a few reasons why your sales metrics can appear different in WooCommerce vs. Independent Analytics Pro.
These are mainly differences in the way the data is reported due to the analytics serving different purposes.
Revenue attributed to different days
WooCommerce attributes revenue to the day it’s received, while Independent Analytics Pro attributes revenue to the day the order was placed.
For example, if a customer places an order on the 1st day of the month and pays on the 3rd, WooCommerce will attribute the revenue to the 3rd. From the perspective of an eCommerce platform, this makes sense because you need to see clearly when you receive revenue so you can understand your cash flow.
In this same scenario, Independent Analytics Pro will report the order on the 1st, and when the customer pays, it will also attribute the revenue to the 1st. This is necessary so that the order and earnings can be attributed to the session where the order took place.
For instance, when you view the Referrers report for the 1st, you can see that a visitor came from Google and spent $20. The idea is to attach earnings to a single referrer/campaign/page, and this approach makes that easy.
If the revenue is reported on a separate day, it becomes more difficult to trace where your earnings came from, and the results can get very confusing when viewing sales for individual days, e.g. you could view the Campaigns report for today and see $100 in revenue but no campaigns to attribute it to because the sales all came from a campaign that people visited yesterday but not today.
Counting taxes and shipping costs
WooCommerce has a variety of metrics for evaluating revenue with and without taxes and shipping costs.
Independent Analytics Pro includes all revenue in its Gross Sales metric, which includes taxes and shipping costs. We do this to keep the metric simple and to enable consistency with other eCommerce plugins, like Easy Digital Downloads and FluentCart.
For this reason, you may see a difference in some metrics, like Average Order Volume, when comparing WooCommerce with IA Pro. Namely, the value might be higher in IA Pro because taxes and shipping costs are included.
The Total Sales metric is Gross Sales – Refunds.
Missing orders
There are times when you may see an order reported in WooCommerce, but not in Independent Analytics Pro. For instance, if you manually create an order for a customer, this will not be reported by IA Pro because there was no recorded session where the order took place.
If you have other orders that are missing, please follow the steps in this guide to resolve the issue.
