How to Create a Travel Expense Report in Google Analytics

Trying to create a travel expense report for your flights, meals, and hotels directly within Google Analytics? It's a common point of confusion, but Google Analytics is actually designed for tracking website data - not financial receipts. However, you can use it for something even more powerful for a travel business: building a marketing performance report. This article will show you exactly how to track your marketing expenses (like ad spend) against the revenue and bookings your website generates, giving you a true measure of your campaign ROI.

First Things First: Understanding What Google Analytics Tracks

Before building any reports, it’s important to clarify what Google Analytics is designed to do. It’s a web analytics tool that helps you understand how visitors find and interact with your website. Think of it as the ultimate dashboard for your online presence.

Google Analytics primarily tracks:

• Website Traffic: How many people are visiting your site, where they're coming from (Google search, social media, ads), and what devices they're using.

• User Behavior: Which pages they view, how long they stay, and what actions they take on your site.

• Conversions: The valuable actions you want users to take, such as booking a hotel, submitting an inquiry for a tour, or signing up for a newsletter.

Conversely, it isn't designed to handle financial accounting for your business. For tracking mileage, meal receipts, and hotel invoices, you're much better off using a dedicated expense tracking app (like Expensify or Zoho Expense) or a simple spreadsheet.

Now, let's focus on what you can build in GA4: a report that measures your travel company's marketing performance by comparing what you spend on ads to what you earn in bookings.

Building Your Travel Marketing Performance Report in GA4

The goal here is simple: to see which marketing channels are giving you the best bang for your buck. To do this, we need to get your cost data (what you spend on ads) and your revenue data (what you earn from bookings) into one place. Here’s how to do it, step-by-step.

Step 1: Set Up E-commerce and Conversion Tracking

You can't measure success if you don't define what success looks like. For a travel business, the most important conversions are typically online bookings or leads. Getting this data into GA4 is the non-negotiable first step.

For a travel website, key conversions (called "conversion events" in GA4) might include:

• purchase: When a user successfully books and pays for a hotel room, flight, or tour package. This is the most crucial event for measuring revenue.

• generate_lead: When a user fills out a contact form to inquire about a custom travel package.

• sign_up: A less direct conversion, like when a user joins your email list for travel deals.

To track revenue, you’ll need to enable e-commerce tracking. This setup is a bit more technical and usually requires help from a developer or configuration using Google Tag Manager. During the setup, your developer will ensure that every online booking sends key details like transaction_id, value, and currency to Google Analytics. Once this is done, you'll be able to see the actual revenue generated by your users right inside your reports.

Step 2: Link Your Google Ads Account

The easiest way to import expense data is by connecting your Google Ads account directly to Google Analytics 4. Once linked, data like impressions, clicks, and a new metric - cost - will automatically appear in your GA4 reports.

Linking the accounts is straightforward:

1. In your Google Analytics 4 property, go to Admin (the gear icon at the bottom-left).

2. In the Property column, click on Product Links and select Google Ads Links.

3. Click the blue Link button.

4. Choose the Google Ads accounts you want to link and follow the on-screen configuration steps.

That’s it! Within 24-48 hours, your Google Ads cost data will start populating in your GA4 reports, giving you a clear view of your ad spend versus the conversions and revenue it drives.

Step 3: Import Cost Data From Social Media and Other Ad Platforms

What about your expenses from Facebook Ads, Microsoft Ads, or affiliate partners? GA4 doesn’t have direct connections for these, so you’ll need to import their cost data manually using the “Data Import” feature.

You'll do this by uploading a CSV file with correctly formatted data. Here’s how:

1. In GA4, navigate to Admin > Data Import.

2. Click the blue Create data source button.

3. Give your data source a name (e.g., "Facebook Ads Cost") and select Cost data as the data source type.

4. GA4 will ask you to map your file’s columns to GA4 dimensions. At a minimum, your CSV file needs these columns:

   • date (formatted as YYYY-MM-DD)

   • utm_source (e.g., facebook)

   • utm_medium (e.g., cpc)

   • utm_campaign (The name of your campaign)

   • cost (A number representing the campaign spend)

   Create your CSV file with your campaign data. It should look like this:

5. Back in GA4, simply upload the CSV file to the data source you created.

Keep in mind, this is a manual process. You'll need to upload a new CSV file every day, week, or reporting period to keep your data up to date. While tedious, it's the only built-in way to see a consolidated view of your non-Google ad expenses.

Step 4: Create Your Custom Performance Report

With all your revenue and cost data in place, it’s time to build your report. The Explore section in GA4 is perfect for creating custom-tailored reports from scratch.

Here’s how to build a simple marketing ROI report:

1. In the left-hand navigation, click Explore and select Free form.

2. In the Variables column on the left, click the '+' icon next to Dimensions. Search for and import:

   • Session source / medium

   • Session campaign

3. Next, click the '+' icon next to Metrics. Search for and import:

   • Sessions

   • Conversions

   • Total revenue

   • Cost (this now includes Google Ads and your imported data)

4. Drag and drop your fields into the Tabs Settings column:

   • Drag Session campaign to Rows.

   • Drag Sessions, Cost, Conversions, and Total revenue to Values.

Instantly, a table will appear on the right showing each of your marketing campaigns across all platforms, along with the sessions they generated, how much they cost, and how much revenue they brought in. Now you can easily spot your most profitable travel campaigns and identify underperformers that need rethinking or optimization.

Final Thoughts

While Google Analytics isn't built for managing your company's T&E receipts, it's an exceptional tool for creating travel marketing performance reports. By combining conversion data with cost data from both Google and third-party ad platforms, you can build a comprehensive dashboard that clearly answers the most important question: "Is our marketing working?"

Of course, manually exporting CSVs from Facebook, cleaning them up, and uploading them into GA4 every week is a headache nobody enjoys. We built Graphed to automate that entire process. By connecting your tools like Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, Shopify, and Klaviyo, we automatically unify your data so you get real-time dashboards instantly. You can build comprehensive reports simply by asking in plain English - no wrestling with manual uploads or configuration required.