Webmaster Tools and Geolocation
-
Our site gets a significant amount of traffic from Venezuela, about 9% based on our Google Analytics (the US being 63%). According to Webmaster Tools we get 48% of our clicks from Venezuela. That discrepancy is massive, considering we are an English site. My theory is that they are not allowed/capable of using secure search in Venezuela for some legal reason and therefore their searches are much more 'visible'. Does anyone have any insight?
-
Thanks for the interest. The domain is Covers.com (think: the ESPN for people who sports bet) and there is good reason why Venezuelans would visit since they are crazy for baseball, but the numbers are so wildly out of proportion there must be more at play here. I can telly you that from a sales standpoint and from a participation in contests and the forums that Venezuelans are not over represented in site use.
Another factor could be size perhaps? We serve about 1.2 Billion pages a year, and have reached the extent of Google Analytics free product long ago. We don't have the Premium yet though.
We did have the geo-target set in WMT to 'undefined' but recently have switched to 'United States'
Thanks again for any help!
-
Hi Glen,
in order to offer you a more credible answer, it would be great if you could share the name of your domain that is having such an unexpected success from Venezuela.
There can be many reasons, many of which not all related to SEO, that could explain those spikes of organic traffic from Venezuela. For instance, is your site selling some specific product? It may be - knowing how in Venezuela is almost impossible to find even basic product if not in the black market - that your product is highly demanded there, hence searched. Also... consider that the wealthy Venezuelan class speaks English and uses it (and it has also a good spending costume).
However, you can try to understand the nature of the sessions analyzing the users' metrics. For instance, is it a traffic that stays on the site and visit more pages, or it just enters and bounce out? Do you even saw any kind of conversion from Venezuelan sessions.
ASAP you give us more information, I and all the people here surely will be able to help you better.
-
Hi Glen,
I don't have any specific insight regarding Venezuela, however a few notes:
-
In general, Analytics data is viewed in the industry as MUCH more accurate than Webmaster Tools data. If Analytics is implemented correctly (I'd start by checking this with the Google Tag Assistant plugin for Chrome), then I'd simply assume an error in WMT reporting unless I saw other evidence that might convince me that WMT is correct.
-
I think you may have misunderstood how secure search works. Secure search doesn't mean that the visits aren't tracking, it just means that you won't get keyword data for those visits in Analytics. If your hypothesis that you have way more visibility in Venezuela is correct, that would show in Analytics.
Hope this helps! Feel free to message me if you have any other questions
Mark
-
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Is there such tool?
Morning Moz! Is there such tool, to view if your site has Google Analytics script by page? (I mean page by page, so to crawl an entire site) It's a 500+ page website, so i'm trying to avoid viewing source of each individual page. Thank you!
Reporting & Analytics | | Whittie0 -
Pinterest links have been growing in Webmaster Tools
I've been using Pinterest for a couple of years now. It has been great in promoting our brand and generating referral traffic. My question is this. I've noticed in Webmaster Tools, in the "Links to your site" section, that my links from Pinterest has really shot up.It's gone from 3,500 links, 6 months ago, to over 23,000 recently. Those of you using Pinterest, have you seen a similar increase? Just wondering if Google is recognizing more of the links, even though they are "no-follow" links.
Reporting & Analytics | | tdawson090 -
Any issues with Google impressions dropping in Webmaster Tools?
I'm seeing a drop in impressions across all my websites that are hosted at a certain location. Just wanted to make sure that it is not some reporting issue that others are seeing.
Reporting & Analytics | | tdawson090 -
Problem: Google web master tools with HTML Improvements
Hello, When using the google webmaster tools, on Optimization --> HTML Improvements, I have some problems in field the Short meta descriptions. This is easy to fix and I fixed some last days, then today I check this again. Google webmaster tool still report these errors. Please let me know how to notify to google, these errors was fixed?
Reporting & Analytics | | JohnHuynh0 -
Google Webmaster. Backlinks
GWMT only shows that there are 3 domains pointing to a site of mine. I'm looking under "Links to site". But this can't be true because the site is pretty old and I know there are hundreds of domains that point to this one. What would explain this discrepancy? And is there some other free tool that will show all the backlinks? I've used Opensite explorer but that tool isn't close to comprehensive as GWMT usually is (based on other sites I've analyzed)
Reporting & Analytics | | priceseo0 -
Google Webmaster Tools not displaying all backlinks
I was asked to take a look at a site that a friend redesigned and immediately plummeted in rankings. It was a flash site where the domain redirected to a flash landing page. When the site was redesigned, they removed the flash page and put in the new site on the domain URL without changing the redirect or putting a 301 in place on the old flash landing page URL. This site didn't have many backlinks to begin with, but it did ok for some important search phrases. Now when I look in Webmaster Tools, there are only 2 backlinks showing. Meanwhile I know there are more backlinks in existence, primarily from yellowpages and citysearch. I've had them put a 301 on the old flash landing page pointing at the domain URL and they've added a canonical URL. What have I missed here?
Reporting & Analytics | | BostonWright0 -
How to Setup New Domain in Webmaster Tools? Can Anybody HELP?
I, I have a new domain, and a new account is now created in webmatser tools. Is there anythings I should know about using or setting up webmaster tools? For example, the geographic target, I'm in Canada our web site, a local Pilates studio, is a commercial web site to provides informations about our services. Should I select Canada? One thing about this, I have another domain, http://www.furnacefilterscanada.com/ and in the setiing, I have select geographic target to: Canada. When using google.ca result are better then when using google.com! I think must Canadian user are using google.com Does this ''Geographic Target'' setting has anythings to do with search results in Goolge.ca versus Google.com? Thank you for your help, BigBlaze
Reporting & Analytics | | BigBlaze2050 -
Indexed URLs in Webmaster Tools
Hi everybody! I've been looking at my Webmaster Tools stats, and it looks like not all the URLs in the sitemap tree have been indexed, according to WMT at least. Is this reliable, and if so, is it worth investigating further? | Sitemap | Status | Type | Downloaded | URLs submitted | URLs in web index |
Reporting & Analytics | | neooptic
| | /ISitemap1.xml | | Sitemap | Dec 15, 2011 | 2,000 | 1,309 |
| | /isitemap.xml | | Index | Dec 15, 2011 | 8,695 | 4,127 |
| | /isitemap2.xml | | Sitemap | Dec 15, 2011 | 2,000 | 998 |
| | /isitemap3.xml | | Sitemap | Dec 15, 2011 | 2,000 | 819 |
| | /isitemap4.xml | | Sitemap | Dec 15, 2011 | 2,000 | 719 |
| | /isitemap5.xml | | Sitemap | Dec 15, 2011 | 695 | 282 | Thanks!0