Choosing Objectives and Currency on the Statistics Page

The controls at the top of an experiment’s Statistics tab decide what the whole page is measuring. Every table, chart and significance verdict below them reflects those choices, so it is worth knowing what each one does before reading a result.

Objective

The objective is what is being measured — the conversion event, or revenue. Changing it recomputes everything: rates, intervals, p-values, power and the recommendation.

An experiment can win on one objective and lose on another, and this is common rather than exceptional. A change that increases the number of orders while reducing average order value may raise conversion rate and lower revenue. Both figures are true; deciding which one the business cares about is your call, not the platform’s.

Choose the objective that matches the decision. If you are optimising revenue, judge the test on revenue, and do not declare victory on a conversion-count win you were not testing for.

Currency

The currency selector scopes revenue figures to one currency. The distinction that matters:

• Conversions are counted across every currency. A conversion is a conversion whatever it was paid in, so the count does not depend on this control.
• Revenue cannot be. Adding SEK to EUR produces a meaningless total, so revenue needs a specific currency chosen.

Why "All currencies" hides revenue

On a site that records more than one currency, selecting All currencies with revenue as the objective does not produce a grand total, and Pertento will tell you a currency is needed.

This is deliberate. Behind the scenes, "all currencies" is also the marker used for traffic recorded without any currency at all, so a revenue figure under that selection would cover only that subset while presenting itself as a total. Showing nothing is more honest than showing a fraction labelled as a whole.

If your site only ever records one currency, this does not affect you: there is nothing to disambiguate and revenue reports normally.

Getting currency into your data

Currency is read from the conversion event your site or integration sends. If revenue is missing or lands under the placeholder currency, the event is arriving without a recognised currency field — see the article on posting conversion events for the field names that are accepted.

Notes

• Changing objective or currency never changes stored data. It changes what is being reported.
• The website’s default currency and conversion event name are set per website in its settings, and the conversion event name is what the dashboard tiles are labelled after.
• Decide the objective before the experiment starts. Choosing it after seeing the results is how a losing test becomes a winning one on paper.