How to Find Duplicate Transactions in Google Analytics

Let's start

One of the important things we do after setting up enhanced ecommerce tracking in Google Analytics is to verify the ecommerce data. Verifying data means to make sure the transactions data is accurate. One of the things we test while verifying ecommerce data is to look for duplicate transactions.

There are multiple reasons which causes duplicate transactions in Google Analytics. One of the reason is when a user can access the order confirmation page without actually purchasing a product or when a user can refresh the order confirmation page.

In this article, I will show you how to easily find duplicate transactions in Google Analytics with custom reports.

Finding Duplicate Transactions

To do this, open your google analytics account and follow the steps below:

Navigate to customization and click custom report

 open custom reports

Click on the new custom report button

 create new custom report

Enter the title of report as Duplicate Transactions

Select the report type as Flat Table

Click on the add dimension button and select the dimension as Transaction ID

Click on the add metric button and select metric as Transactions

 customize custom report

Click on the save button.

Now, there are two ways to identify multiple transactions. First is by displaying the transactions in descending order and second is by applying the filter.

To display the transactions in descending order, click on the transactions header. The arrow will turn downwards as shown in the below image.

 view custom report

As you can see the order id with 18565 has two transactions.

The second way to track duplicate transactions is by applying a filter. To do this, click on the advanced link on top of the report table.

Apply the filter to only display transactions greater than 1.

 filter custom report

Conclusion

You should always verify for duplicate transactions whenever you verify ecommerce data. Otherwise, your data will not be accurate and clean to make business decisions. In our next article, I will be explaining how to fix the duplicate transactions.

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