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AA Reporting - Sum of Breakdown Values Never Matches Total

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found a few articles on this topic but am not sure I understood them correctly. Can someone explain why, for some dimensions, the sum of the breakdown values does not match the total count? Why does this happen with only some metrics and not all?

Here I was using url as a dimension and product view as a metric and then breaking down url's with product ID's. 

 

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2 Replies

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Community Advisor and Adobe Champion

Hi @SatishKuumar, I'm not sure if you meant to include a screenshot with your description. But generally, what you're seeing is a deduplicated total. When you put a dimension in a freeform table, Adobe will give you the amount for each row, but then for the grand total at the top it will count what is essentially the unique instances of it.

For example,

 

Order 1: Product A and Product B

Order 2: Product B

Order 3: Product B and Product C

Order 4: Product A 

 

Your table would look like this:

 

Product            Orders

                            4

Product A            2

Product B           3

Product C           1

 

If you were to add up all of the rows, you would get 6, because there were 6 products that were ordered. But only 4 orders were placed. So the grand total is deduplicating this amount for you automatically. This is why it generally isn't a good idea to sum up the rows of a dimension, because if more than one value can happen in the same hit, summing the rows gets rid of the deduplication and over counts your total metric.

For something like orders this is very common, because you can have more than one item in an order. For a metric like product page view or cart addition, it's less likely. Typically for those you only see one product at a time, but if your implementation had it set up to add multiple products to a cart at the same time or multiple products on the page, you would see the same thing as with the orders metric.

 

Now, there are times when the table will show a "column sum" instead of a grand total. If you bring in segments instead of dimensions, or you bring in individual items of a dimension (not the whole dimension), it will treat each of those as a separate item and not deduplicate your total, it will give you a duplicated sum instead. 

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Community Advisor and Adobe Champion

I agree with @MandyGeorge, in general the totals will de-duplicate. This is intended behaviour.