Unique Purchases & Quantity is identical

Question

In my Enhanced Ecommerce report in Google Analytics i have some strange behaviors of Unique Purchases and Quantity

I see that Unique Purchases is linked to Transactions, how many times have this product been in the productlist of purchase

Quantity is the number of units sold in all transactions.

In our Scenario we can have multiple products, even the same product in one transaction. There are many users that have bought the same product 3 times in same transaction, but still it shows identical. Why is that? i was expecting that Quantity will be much more?

Example

Thank you!

Answer 1

I have experienced this as well and I found an answer at least for our implementation. The "problem" seems to be that google analytics doesn't aggregate data on a product level. That means that if you put two of the same items into the basket and send out the order, you could expect the metrics to be "Unique Purchase: 1" "Quantity: 2". but the result will be, as you experienced "Unique Purchase: 2" "Quantity: 2".

The reason why this happens, lies within the tracking code of enhanced ecommerce. The code uses the object parameter "quantity" to measure the quantity and as I said doesn't aggregate the quantity of two products when the data is being send to google analytics.

An example code from the developers website shows, that usually a loop is being used to add the product information of every single product, so every single product will have "Unique Purchases: 1" and "Quantity: 1" if the value of the parameter "quantity" is 1.

function checkout(cart) {
  for(var i = 0; i < cart.length; i++) {
    var product = cart[i];
    ga('ec:addProduct', {
      'id': product.id,
      'name': product.name,
      'category': product.category,
      'brand': product.brand,
      'variant':  product.variant,
      'price': product.price,
      'quantity': product.qty
    });
  }
}