PayPal Data Connector User Guide

PayPal Data Connector User Guide

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PayPal is a widely used payment processing platform, and integrating its data into your analytics workflow can provide valuable insights into your business performance. This guide will walk you through the process of setting up PayPal as a data source in Power My Analytics, enabling you to automate your data collection and create insightful reports.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, ensure you have:
  1. A PayPal Business account
  2. API credentials (API username, API password, and Signature) for your PayPal account
Follow the instructions in How to Connect to PayPal to obtain your API credentials.

Adding PayPal as a Data Source

  1. Log in to your Power My Analytics hub.
  2. Navigate to Sources from the menu.
  3. Click + New Data Source.
  4. Select PayPal from the gallery.
  5. Enter your PayPal API username, API password, and Signature to authenticate.

Creating a Data Studio Report

Follow these steps to create a Data Studio report using your PayPal data:
  1. After adding PayPal as a data source, go to Reports > Data Studio
  2. Select PayPal under Create Data Studio Report (this will open the official Data Studio application in a new window)
  3. Google Data Studio Configuration:
    1. Step 1:
      1. Name your data source (e.g., "PayPal - Your Organization Name")
      2. Choose your Power My Analytics hub from the dropdown
      3. Optional: Leave "Use report template for new reports" checked to use the PMA demo template
      4. Click Next
    2. Step 2:
      1. User Account: Select your PayPal account (for real data) or "Sample Account" (for sample data)
      2. Click Next
    3. Step 3:
      1. Choose the currency symbol for your reports
      2. Click Connect (top right) to complete the data source configuration
    4. Step 4:
      1. Click Create Report (top right)
For a quick start, use our pre-built PayPal demo template.

Key Reports and Fields

PayPal data in Power My Analytics offers a wide range of metrics and dimensions. Here are some popular metrics you can use in your reports:
  • Performance Metrics: Transactions, Transaction Total, PayPal Fees, Order Quantity, Net After Fees, Transaction Quantity
  • Transaction Metrics: Amount, Item Amount, Sales Tax, Shipping, PayPal Fees, Net After Fees
For a complete list of available PayPal fields, refer to the Schema Explorer.

Limitations and Important Considerations

  1. Cached Data Requests with Unique Metrics and Date Dimension: When a unique metric is paired with the date dimension, this will result in a request for cached data instead of a request for live data. For more information, please see Understanding Cached and Live Data Requests.
  2. Backfilling: When you first connect your PayPal account as a data source, 24 months of historical data will be backfilled.

Unavailable Data

  1. Realtime data
  2. Custom fields

Troubleshooting

See our article Basic Troubleshooting for information on issues that may affect the PayPal connector.