'What is the difference between Unique Purchases and Transactions in Google Analytics?
Not able to grasp the concept behind these two different terms. Can anyone please help out with an example?
Solution 1:[1]
Transactions are the number of purchases or orders from your site, total.
Unique Purchases is the one that trips people up a bit.
From Google's dimension/metrics reference in the API documentation:
The number of product sets purchased. For example, if users purchase 2 frisbees and 5 tennis balls from the site, this will be 2.
That can still be a little unclear, because there are three relevant places that Unique Purchases can show up as a metric: either as a top-line aggregated metric, in a list of products or in a list of transactions.
When you're looking at a list of transactions, Unique Purchases is the number of different products in the transaction. So if you have one transaction with 3 frisbees and one tennis ball, the Unique Purchases value for that transaction will be 2.
When you're looking at a report by product, the Unique Purchases is the number of times that the product appeared in a transaction. For example, if you had two transactions total, one which sold 2 frisbees and one that sold 15 tennis balls, the Unique Purchases would be 1 for each product.
Finally, if you're looking at the top-line aggregate metric for a date range, not broken down by a product or transaction metric, Unique Purchases is the sum of the list of either of the above for all products/transactions. It's effectively the count of all items sold, removing duplicates within a transaction.
So, if you have 37 transactions and 74 unique purchases and 100 quantity overall:
- 37 Transactions says you had 37 orders for products from your site.
- 74 Unique Purchases says that that you sold individual SKUs 74 times, though some of those times may include multiple items (which is why Quantity is higher).
- Together, these metrics say that people purchased an average of two different kinds of things in each transaction, while the number of items purchased per transaction is closer to 3 (about 2.7).
Solution 2:[2]
Unique purchases - It is the count of items sold. Even if the product is sold more than once(or if a quantity of product in a transaction is more than one), report will show the count as 1
Transaction - It is the number of orders on the site. Transaction metric does not indicate the number of products(or quantity of product) in the Order.
Sources
This article follows the attribution requirements of Stack Overflow and is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
Source: Stack Overflow
| Solution | Source |
|---|---|
| Solution 1 | colintemple |
| Solution 2 | suchindra_kala |