I'm having an issue with Unique Events and Total events. I don't really understand why unique events are greater than total events (image attached: https://analytics-a-googleproductforums-com.googlegroups.com/attach/584c3c65bd24cfec/Screenshot%20at%202013-05-14%2017:00:40.png?gda=9qkpgUYAAADqfLbDOUx1KZ9vP-6pB8mH0QevsNJBCwpb2zqmxh9R_FqJw8mf6kYUxitGhb4bDE5x40jamwa1UURqDcgHarKEE-Ea7GxYMt0t6nY0uV5FIQ&view=1&part=4).
Someone can explain how this is posible?
Santiago Vázquez
Found the thing: you will see that "Unique Events" are great than "Total Events" when you look at an event category or action, put "Event Label" as a secondary dimension and the event has been triggered some times with no label input. Google Analytics hasn't the option "(not set)" for this particular dimension, so it just doesn't show you those events in the Total Events Count, but still counts as "Unique Events" all the users that executed this particular event category / action.
I am seeing this same issue in my the first view of my Custom Report as well. I don't know WHY it is showing more, but there seems to be a more accurate Custom Report drilldown for you to use. In my reports, one page shows in my Page drilldown with 30 total events but 62 Unique Events. However, when I click into the next dimension drilldown view, in other words click to narrow in on just one page, it shows that same page with 30 total events and only 29 unique events. That seems more accurate.
My dimensions drilldowns for this custom report are "Page" and then "Event Label"
Hope this helps!
I think Google Analytics is simply buggy.
They have to work on event reporting a bit more.
We are tracking events and e-commerce data to our own database, and we realised that both Google Analitics and Universal Analitics misses some events and e-commerce data.
We are trying to find the reason for this, but no luck yet.
If you have a segment applied it's probably sampling. You can confirm or deny sampling is the cause by seeing if there is a yellow background note above the graph but below the date selection on the report page. There is also a grid of filled in and not filled in circles next to the new scholar cap (also below the date selection) sometimes.
Unique events are calculated by session, while total events are determined by the main dimension.
In the example report below, I wanted to look at how many events occurred on each page. The dimension drilldown is Page, with Total Events and Unique Events as metrics. Users can visit a page, but not send an event by that page ( 0 total events ). However, if their session includes an event, then unique events will be 1 or more.
Custom reports allow data combinations that may not be clear (not sure if someone already posted this point or if I saw it in another thread). Basically, my report should not include Unique Events to prevent this problem from happening, though this was probably the wrong way to go about this altogether.
Template: https://www.google.com/analytics/web/template?uid=XafJ7KvSSf-n5KWWPyvn_g
Google has deprecated (renamed) Unique Events metric as it was seriously confusing. We are expecting to see a number of times event with unique combination of category / action and label happened per other dimensions in report. Instead GA calculated a unique combination of every dimension in the report! Now, this metric is deprecated and renamed to legacy. New one: Unique Events is giving expected results.
I written about why total events are higher than in my blog as too many questions.
Total Events are calculated as the total number of interactions with a tracked web page object. On the other hand, where a single user session (or visit) has one or more events, this is calculated as a single Visit w/Event, or Unique Event in the reports. For example, if one user clicks the same button on a video 5 times, the total number of events associated with the video is 5, and the number of unique events is 1.
