Two Reasons for Missing Transactions in Google Analytics

By Beacon News | Published March 3, 2016 | Categories: Google Analytics

How closely have you looked at your transaction data in Google Analytics? Have you seen where sometimes there are missing transactions in GA?

Here is an example of what I mean:

Notice, in this example transaction numbers that are missing are: W000051, W000050, W000043.

Can you guess why they might be missing?

Alright don’t give yourself a headache trying to rack your brain for reason this happens. Let me give you a couple reasons I’ve found and just keep in mind this could be true for your CMS or there could be a totally different reason.

Reason #1 for Missing Transactions

Remember the data above, well the reason for the skipped transaction IDs there is because this particular CMS generates an order number for any user who gets past the billing/shipping screen in the checkout process but didn’t make it through and complete the order.

Basically, an order is created and a cookie set so that the user can come back to the site within a months’ time and complete their order should they decide too. If they don’t and the month has passed the order is deleted out of the system.

Reason #2 for Missing Transactions

Here is another example of missing orders from a separate GA account.

Notice in this example missing order numbers are: 121098, 121097, 121092, 121091, 121089, 121088, 121085.

Quite a few, huh!

The reason for these missing orders is totally unrelated to the first reason. This particular CMS is Aspdotnetstorefront which is a popular ecommerce platform. Missing orders here are related to a user going through the checkout and putting in credit card information then clicking to submit the order and getting a payment error message. When they enter their info again and click submit a brand new order number is created.

Crazy! I know! It’s always so interesting to me how CMS’s function. I don’t understand the reasoning for this but we’ll just table that for another discussion.

So anyway, I’d love to hear if you’ve noticed this problem in your analytics account and if the same reasons apply to your data or if you have other reasoning’s for it! Leave me a comment below and let me know.

Make sure you check back often too. I’ll update this post if I find any other reasons this can happens.  :)