Your WooCommerce dashboard says you made $47,000 last month. GA4 says $38,000. And Looker Studio shows $41,000 depending on which data source you connected. You’re not looking at three tools showing the same data differently. You’re looking at three tools measuring fundamentally different things. GA4 underreports ecommerce revenue by 15-50% compared to WooCommerce because it only sees visitors whose browsers cooperate (Google Analytics Help, 2025). Understanding what each dashboard actually measures is the difference between confident decisions and expensive guesses.

Why the Numbers Never Match#

The revenue gap between WooCommerce and GA4 isn’t a bug. It’s a feature of how each system collects data.

WooCommerce records every order that enters your database. When a customer clicks “Place Order” and payment processes, WooCommerce writes that transaction to your MySQL database. No JavaScript required. No browser cooperation needed. No consent banner interaction necessary. If the order exists, WooCommerce counts it. This is ground truth.

GA4 only counts what reaches it through browser-side tracking. A visitor using an ad blocker? Invisible. A visitor who rejects your consent banner? No events fire. A Safari user whose cookies expired between their first visit and their purchase three days later? That’s a new, unattributed session. GA4 applies data thresholding that hides rows when traffic is too low to show statistically meaningful data (Google Analytics Help, 2025). For small stores, this means entire traffic sources disappear from reports.

Looker Studio is not a data source—it’s a visualization layer. It shows exactly what you connect to it. Connect GA4, and you see GA4’s incomplete picture in prettier charts. Connect BigQuery with complete server-side data, and you see everything. WooCommerce native analytics cannot combine data from multiple reports into a single dashboard (Databloo, 2025). Looker Studio can—but only if the underlying data is complete.

WooCommerce Native Analytics: Your Revenue Truth#

WooCommerce’s built-in analytics section is the most underused tool in your dashboard. Most store owners never open it because they assume GA4 handles all analytics. That’s a mistake.

Use WooCommerce analytics when you need to know: exact revenue, order counts, average order value, refund totals, product performance by units sold, and tax collected. These numbers come directly from your database. They are not estimated, sampled, or modeled. They are your financial truth.

WooCommerce Analytics added Order Attribution reports that show channel, source, campaign, and device breakdowns for each order. This is first-party attribution data—not GA4’s modeled attribution. The limitation is that it’s last-touch only. You see which channel closed the sale, not which channel started the journey.

WooCommerce native reports only show data from WooCommerce itself, excluding other tools and platforms (Putler, 2025). You can’t see bounce rates, session duration, or user flow. You can’t compare behavior between traffic sources. For revenue decisions, it’s authoritative. For marketing optimization, it’s incomplete.

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GA4: Your Behavior Pattern Engine#

GA4 excels at answering questions WooCommerce can’t: Where do visitors come from? What pages do they view before purchasing? Where do they drop off in your funnel? Which traffic sources produce repeat buyers versus one-time purchasers?

Use GA4 when you need to know: traffic source performance, user behavior flow, funnel drop-off points, landing page effectiveness, and audience segment behavior. These are marketing questions, not financial questions.

The Explore reports—free-form, funnel, path, and segment overlap—reveal patterns no other free tool can show. A funnel exploration tells you that 23% of visitors abandon checkout at the shipping step. A segment overlap shows that email subscribers who also came through organic search have 3x the lifetime value. These insights drive marketing decisions.

But GA4’s revenue numbers are wrong. Always. Not because GA4 is broken, but because it’s structurally unable to see every transaction. Between ad blockers (31.5% of visitors), consent rejection, and Safari ITP cookie limits, GA4 consistently underreports. If you’re making financial decisions—inventory, hiring, cash flow projections—using GA4 revenue, you’re building on incomplete numbers.

Looker Studio: Your Custom View#

Looker Studio is Google’s free dashboard tool. It connects to GA4, Google Sheets, BigQuery, and dozens of other data sources to create custom visualizations. The dashboards are shareable, auto-refreshing, and visually polished.

Use Looker Studio when you need to: combine data from multiple sources into one view, create executive dashboards that non-technical stakeholders can read, build automated weekly reports, and visualize trends over time with custom date ranges.

The power of Looker Studio depends entirely on what you feed it. Connected to GA4 alone, it inherits all of GA4’s data gaps. Connected to BigQuery with complete server-side event data, it becomes the unified reporting layer that solves the “which dashboard do I trust” problem entirely.

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The Decision Framework#

Stop bouncing between dashboards hoping one of them is “right.” Use this framework instead.

“How much revenue did we make?” → WooCommerce Analytics. Always. This is the number that matches your bank account and your accounting software. If WooCommerce says $47,000, you made $47,000.

“Which marketing channels are working?” → GA4 for directional insights, but understand the data is 15-50% incomplete. Use it to identify patterns—which channels trend upward, which are declining—not to calculate precise ROAS.

“Can I see everything in one place?” → Looker Studio connected to BigQuery. This is the only configuration that combines WooCommerce’s complete revenue data with behavioral analytics in a single dashboard. Without BigQuery, Looker Studio is just a prettier version of whichever incomplete data source you connected.

“Should I reorder inventory / hire staff / adjust pricing?” → WooCommerce Analytics. These are financial decisions that require financial truth. GA4’s underreported revenue will lead you to under-order, under-hire, and under-invest.

The Unified Reporting Path#

The real answer to “which dashboard should I trust” is: build one source of truth that feeds all your dashboards. That source is a data warehouse—specifically BigQuery for most WooCommerce stores—where complete server-side event data lives alongside your WooCommerce order data.

The Transmute Engine™ streams every WooCommerce event to BigQuery via its outPIPE integration. Every page view, every add-to-cart, every purchase—captured server-side, immune to ad blockers, stored permanently in your own data warehouse. Looker Studio connects natively to BigQuery, giving you the complete-data dashboard that neither GA4 nor WooCommerce analytics can provide alone.

When your data warehouse has everything, the question changes. You stop asking “which dashboard is right” and start asking “what does the data tell me.”

Key Takeaways#

• WooCommerce analytics is revenue truth. Every order in your database is counted. Use it for financial decisions—inventory, hiring, cash flow.
• GA4 is your behavior engine. Use it for traffic patterns, funnel analysis, and marketing channel trends—but never as your revenue source.
• Looker Studio is only as good as its data source. Connected to GA4 alone, it inherits the same gaps. Connected to BigQuery with complete data, it becomes your unified view.
• GA4 underreports revenue by 15-50% due to ad blockers, consent rejection, and cookie expiry. Financial decisions based on GA4 revenue are systematically wrong.
• BigQuery is the unifying layer. Server-side tracking to a data warehouse gives every dashboard the same complete dataset to work from.

The three dashboards aren’t competing. They’re each telling you something different. Use WooCommerce for revenue truth, GA4 for behavior insights, and Looker Studio with BigQuery for the unified picture that ends the guesswork.