Broken Monetization Report in Google Analytics 4. Here’s the fix.

Here’s an unpleasant surprise in Google Analytics 4. You mind your business and accidentally stumble upon the Monetization > Ecommerce purchases report. Normally, it should display your most popular products and how many times they were displayed, added to the cart, purchased, etc.

But now it’s empty and just shows a red exclamation mark. You click it and see a warning:

Incompatible request. A request you made contains an incompatible combination of dimensions, metrics, or both, which has resulted in some data not being shown. Please update the request and try again.

What is this, and why did it happen? In this blog post, I will show you how to fix a broken Monetization report in Google Analytics 4.

An update in Google Analytics 4 caused this

Previously, it was possible to combine (to some extent) item-scoped and event-scoped metrics/dimensions in Google Analytics 4. For example, the Ecommerce purchases metric could be combined with the Item name. But not anymore.

On January 10th, 2023, Google announced that item-scoped metrics would support only item-scoped custom dimensions. For example, Item name will work well with Items purchased.

As a result, the previous report version (where the Item name dimension was combined with metrics such as Ecommerce purchases) will no longer work.

In many properties, Google handled the report properly and migrated it (meaning that some metrics were removed and new metrics were added). But if you have ever customized the Ecommerce purchases report in GA4, it was no longer eligible for this automatic update. At least, that’s what I think/assume.

How to fix a broken “Ecommerce purchases” report in GA4?

First of all, go to your Google Analytics 4 and check if you have that problem at all. Go to Reports > Monetization > Ecommerce purchases. If you still see data, you’re fine. No action is needed.

But if you see an empty table (that previously contained some data) and there is a red exclamation mark above it…

…then implement the following fix.

Create a new Ecommerce purchases report in GA4

Go to Google Analytics 4 > Reports > Library.

Click Create new report > Create detail report.

You will see a list of templates. Select Ecommerce purchases.

Click Save and enter the Name of the report, Ecommerce purchases. Click Save.

Go back to the library of all reports and edit the Life cycle collection (or wherever you kept your older report). Click Edit collection.

On the left sidebar, delete the Ecommerce purchases report.

Then drag the new Ecommerce purchases report from the left column to the right sidebar.

Click Save > Save changes to the current collection.

Done. You have recreated the report, and it should start working again.

After you go back to the list of all reports, you might need to refresh the browser window (if you cannot see the new report yet).

An additional workaround that also includes item list views and checkouts

There is also another alternative (which requires building a Free-form exploration). Simo Ahava shared on Twitter (originally this was suggested by Can Özcer) the following report that you can build:

Even though the screenshot does not include view_item_list, you can also include it in the report. The settings of this report look like this:

However, keep in mind that in this report, the main metric is Total users, not Event count, thus the numbers will not match what you have in the standard report.

Broken Monetization Report in Google Analytics 4: Final words

Multiple students of my courses reported this issue recently, and this is not something you would want to see. Especially if you are a freelancer/agency and the client starts blaming you instead of Google (because, after all, you configured the property).

Google handled this update pretty poorly. But at least we found a workaround/fix (even though it’s not very intuitive).

Normally, I would have expected that I could just simply add item-related metrics one by one when I customized the report. But right now, those metrics are not available to add manually (which looks like yet another Google Analytics 4 inconsistency bug). Hopefully, that will be fixed in the near future.

If this article did not help you and you still have a broken Monetization report in Google Analytics 4, let me know in the comments.