How to Fix Duplicate Orders in Google Analytics
Google Analytics (GA) ecommerce reporting can provide a view on your data that can’t be achieved from any other data source. Enhanced Ecommerce in GA is a flexible model to measure and attribute orders at a channel and product level, plus much more.
In this post I’m going to dig into the issue of duplicate transactions, a common cause of skewed sales and order level data within an GA install.
Before we get started its worth noting that you GA revenue and orders will almost never be 100% accurate compared with your sales platform. There are a number of reasons for this but as a rule of thumb I would say your GA order volume should be within a 5-7% range of accuracy compared to your platform. If this is any greater then its worth running an audit, if you need to some help with this get in touch.
How to find out if you have duplicate orders in Google Analytics
Duplicate orders in Google Analytics means simply that a single transaction ID is counted more than once. This will skew your data inflating the transaction volume, revenue, quantity, and other metrics directly related to transactions/orders.
Identifying this issue in your own install is straight forward. Simply create a custom report (Customisation –> Custom Reports –> New Custom Report) with the following settings.
Metrics: Transactions
Dimensions: Transaction ID
Make sure you give the report a name and hit “Save”. If the resulting report contains any transactions with a value greater than 1, you know you have landed on an issue.
Compare the Total values at the top & bottom right of the table in order to gauge the impact volume. >10% is considered a serious issue.
Resolving the issue of duplicate transactions in Google Analytics
The reason behind duplicate transactions often relates to the ‘Thank You’ page loading loading multiple times. Often websites reuse this page as an order summary and as the user returns to view their order the page reloads complete with the Google Analytics Ecommerce tracking.
Make your ‘Thank You’ page load only once. Every subsequent visit to the thank you url should redirect to another page. This could be an order summary page or something similar, crucially this page should not load the GA ecommerce tag.
Another solution is to make a condition based on something coming from the platform, something that only happens as the transaction is occurs. An example of this could be the payment validation routine, its possible use this event to trigger the ecommerce tag. As a result any subsequent visit to the thank you screen wont include this and so negate the issue.
Google Analytics Enhances Ecommerce reporting can provide a view on your data that can’t be achieved from any other source. Maintaining a robust implementation is crucial – polluted or skewed data can do more harm than no data.
This is why you should audit your Google Analytics and Enhanced Ecommerce setups regularly and compare the numbers in GA against the numbers in your back end and sales system. If you would like some support on this get in touch.