Clean GA4 E-commerce Tracking and Funnels for a Magento 2 Yarn Retailer

01// The broken state

LittleKnits ran separate production and staging environments, and the immediate risk was staging traffic contaminating the production GA4 property. A further complication was that the Magento 2 plugin generating the dataLayer output it in the legacy Universal Analytics format rather than a GA4-ready structure.

02// What we changed

1. aSet up GA4 on the Magento 2 store and implemented e-commerce tracking through Google Tag Manager
2. bUsed a GTM Lookup Variable to route hits to the correct GA4 property by environment, avoiding the overhead of maintaining separate containers for production and staging
3. cWrote a custom JavaScript variable to transform the plugin's Universal Analytics dataLayer into a GA4-ready dataLayer
4. dBuilt conversion funnels in GA4 Explorations to visualize drop-offs at each step of the purchase journey

03// The outcome

A Magento 2 yarn and craft retailer needed GA4 and GTM-based e-commerce tracking without staging data polluting its production analytics. A GTM Lookup Variable separated environments and a custom dataLayer transform delivered clean GA4 e-commerce data, feeding conversion funnels in Explorations.