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I'm a newbie with Google Analytics and Google Data Studio and between two dates I've got a number X of transactions. Of course, in each transaction, you can buy one or more products, but we are going to guess that one transaction is one product. So, the number of products that Google Data Studio shows me that have been sold through a source/medium Y is smaller than X (number of transactions).

Y (number of products sold) < X (number of transactions)

How is that possible?

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If an order is returned/refunded/canceled, some webshop-solutions will resend the transaction-data to Google Analytics using the same transactionID, but with a 0.00 cost and no products. The new data overwrites the old because it has the same transactionId.

There seems to be no other way of telling Google Analytics that an order has been canceled.

If this is the case with your webshop, it could explain why there are more transactions than the total products sold.

Update:

Another way to get a lower product count than transaction count in Google Analytics is if the tracking code has an error and is unable to add the products to the data layer before sending the transaction to Google Analytics.

Google Analytics does not require a list of products to record a transaction.

As we discovered, this is likely the cause of the issue as there have been no cancellations or refunds, and you've found that some transactions are recorded without any products in GA.

There might be invalid settings or a bug in Prestashop or any of the extensions used.

I recommend that you test buying each product (your payment method should have a test-mode you can use to avoid being charged and have to refund), and using Tag Assistant (browser extension) to see if the data is sent correctly to Google Analytics.

This will help you identify which products are causing the issue. They might have invalid settings or unescaped characters (like apostrophe) that causes the javascript code to fail.

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  • Thank you @Levi Johansen. In my case this is not what happend because all the transactions were effective sales. There were no sales returned, refunded or cancelled. Thank you so much for your appreciated help!!! Commented Dec 20, 2019 at 12:50
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    As it is not required to provide name of products to the transaction-data being sent to Google Analytics; there could be a bug that prevents the products from being added and the transaction-data is sent without specified products. Do you find any transactions in GA that have 0 products? Commented Dec 20, 2019 at 13:29
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    I'm guessing the issue only applies to certain products. I suggest identifying which products are missing from Google Analytics. If a product has the character ' (apostrophe) in its name, this could be code-breaking unless the character is escaped. Are you using a plugin/extension to handle the tracking, or has a developer written javascript codes specifically for your webshop to track purchases? Commented Dec 20, 2019 at 14:12
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    Since the issue seems to be in Prestashop, you might get more help by tagging this question with «prestashop» and changing the title. I have never used Prestashop, so I wont be able to assist further. Good luck :) Commented Dec 20, 2019 at 18:38
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    I've updated my answer to reflect the discoveries we've made. Commented Dec 22, 2019 at 12:29

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