Many times, while we read the enhanced eCommerce reports, we need to remind ourselves of the difference between conversion and transactions. Not sure about you but I do get confuse about this a lot more times.
To get the confusion solved, I focussed to work upon the two concepts’ functionality in detail. And, I came across the information that is more obvious to relate.
The two concepts, Conversion, and Transaction are very different. A conversion is a non-eCommerce event whereas a transaction is an e-commerce event.
Still not clear what is being talked about?
(Let’s get this in lil’ detail for better understanding.. )
What is Conversion?
As per Google Analytics Support team, Conversion is any completed activity possessing some kind of success for your business, online or offline.
For example, completion of any activity like subscribing for a newsletter or registering with the online form, etc. or completion of the purchase funnel.
Now, here is a twist. The conversion is of two types – micro and macro. Micro conversion is the completion of any activity while macro conversion is the completed purchase transaction.
Do not confuse here, it is the only doubt we need to get clear. The completed purchase transaction talked here is about as an event and not the transaction in particular.
The Nielsen Norman Groups’ Jen Cardello defined micro conversions into two categories for better understanding-
- Process milestones. The steps were taken in the direction of a macro conversion. For example, a customer may add an item to his cart or wish list or viewing the demo or product page.
- Secondary actions. They indicate an interest and engagement in the site. For example, visitor opening the same result page at regular intervals. Like a visitor to your site opens the same product page results every time he’s visiting your site.
Micro conversion incorporates any type of metrics that the system is tracking from clicking on a CTA(Call to Action) to watching a demo video. These provide a hypothesis for product evaluation. But they aren’t strong enough to support the growth metrics and parameters singlehandedly.
Most often, macro conversion is the final step toward goal completion. And, for an eCommerce business, micro conversions are important to read the details but for broader aspect, macro conversion is the ultimate goal. Macro conversion shows the completed transactions.
(Let’s now learn a little about transaction too..)
What is a Transaction?
As mentioned in the Encyclopedia of Database System, an e-commerce transaction is the sale or purchase of goods and services only. There is a whole process to follow for the transaction to be complete. In these terms, the transaction is the part of a macro conversion.
We, now, know the conversion and the transaction. The next step here is to know what we are here for –
The Difference!
Every single goal conversion in Google Analytics will count each user per session only once. Although you may follow up the several pageviews for the same URL goal by the same user, only one goal completion will be counted. In a similar way, the user could trigger the same events many times in a session. If any particular event is also designed as a goal, then the session will only show the converting goal for one time per user. It is essential to know, especially if you accord email submissions against your goal total in Google Analytics.
On the other hand, for transactions, for every single transaction is tracked separately by Google Analytics. You can have multiple transactions tracked for a single user in a single session with Google Analytics with accurate measures of revenue, taxes, shipping, etc.
In fact, you must know that. . .
Though, transactions are tracked by Google Analytics and so the probability for unintended duplicate transactions is also high. Unintended duplicate transactions can be of the following forms:
- The visitor refreshes the purchase confirmation page.
- Bookmark the purchase confirmation page
- Visit the purchase confirmation page one or more times till the purchased products are received.
- Closing the browser from the quick access window on mobile and opens the browser later, and the browser reloads the purchase confirmation page automatically.
- The user sharing the purchase confirmation page link, and someone accessing the page through the link.
The unintended duplicate transaction is a major issue because they account for the count of transactions that actually didn’t even occurred. Google Analytics has no separately defined solution for this major issue yet. But, nevertheless, Google Analytics has given the provision to formulate one.
YES! You can formulate this yourself with Google Analytics’ Custom reports. You can resolve the issue by creating a custom code that tracks all transaction IDs with a count of more than 1.
(. . .Now you can track the duplicate transactions.)
“Prevention is better than cure.”, very well said. In accordance with this mantra, you can also prevent the occurrences of such duplicate transactions by either not allowing the confirmation page to load more than once or by making an upgrade to your server that enables Google Analytics tracker to only load the page once.
Wrapping up!!
With all the readings done so far, we can say that every transaction is a conversion but not all conversions are transactions. Transactions only accommodate the completion of goal in terms of sale and/or purchase while the conversion is any activity that shows a step forward towards the goal completion.