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
-
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Google webmaster tools hiccup?
Our flagship website, up until March 16 was getting 1600 impressions and 300 branded clicks per day as per GWT. After 3/16, branded search fell to 300 impressions and 25 clicks per day. Our rankings haven't changed, and neither has our traffic. We would definitely notice the decline in GA and Core Metrics, and it is running about the same. according to GWT, 75% fewer people started searching for our brand on 3/16, but all of our other metrics are indicating otherwise. Has anyone seen this before? Is it a tracking issue on our side?
Reporting & Analytics | | AMHC0 -
Webmaster Tools, why does it show 486 pages submitted to web, and only 40 indexed?
I am confused on what a client account shows in WMTs, client account is http://multiview.com. They have a graph showing 486 pages submitted to web, but only 40 are indexed. Also, they recently re-launched, i.e in April 2014, and the new site has about 40 pages indexed.... so I am guessing that the 486 number relates to all the pages that are showing errors in retrieving...i.e. 28 soft 404 errors, 10 access denied errors, 808 not found errors. Does this make sense to explain why there is such a gap between 486 and 40?
Reporting & Analytics | | DianeDP0 -
Webmaster Tools Indexed pages vs. Sitemap?
Looking at Google Webmaster Tools and I'm noticing a few things, most sites I look at the number of indexed pages in the sitemaps report is usually less than 100% (i.e. something like 122 indexed out of 134 submitted or something) and the number of indexed pages in the indexed status report is usually higher. So for example, one site says over 1000 pages indexed in the indexed status report but the sitemap says something like 122 indexed. My question: Is the sitemap report always a subset of the URLs submitted in the sitemap? Will the number of pages indexed there always be lower than or equal to the URLs referenced in the sitemap? Also, if there is a big disparity between the sitemap submitted URLs and the indexed URLs (like 10x) is that concerning to anyone else?
Reporting & Analytics | | IrvCo_Interactive1 -
"not selected" is gone from Google Webmaster Tools Index Status Advanced
Just noticed today that the "not selected" has been removed from the Index status, Advanced section of Google Webmaster Tools. Anyone know why. I've used this metric to determine how or why Google was not selecting pages, particularly to gauge canonical's, 301's and duplicate content. It will be missed if gone for good.
Reporting & Analytics | | tdawson090 -
Rank tracker tool - seomoz
Hi All, I have noticed that ranks in the tool -rank tracker are not correct for my keywords sometimes. Does anybody else has experienced this? Isn't it real time updated? What other free rank tracker tool you guys would suggest which can send you weekly accurate updates? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | EG0CENTRIX0 -
Verify web master tools ?!?!
Randomly today google web master tools all of a sudden wants me to re-verify my site and is giving me the error: Verification failed for **http://www.shiftins.com/ **using the Meta tag method (less than a minute ago). We couldn't find the verification meta tag. but if you view the page source it is clearly listed..... this happened only today while no changes were made to the site. Does anyone have a solution?
Reporting & Analytics | | shiftins0 -
Does prevent links from being included in Google Webmaster linking sites report?
My client has clean links in edit from nytimes.com. The links do not have nofollow tags. Google Webmaster stopped including links from nytimes.com in the external linking domains report and we don't know why since the URL is still live. The nytimes.com URL includes this tag in the source code: Are links on pages with NOARCHIVE still counted in Google Webmaster linking domains reports?
Reporting & Analytics | | ebenthurston0 -
Google Keyword Tool versus Google Analytics
Hi I'm trying to establish a methodology to best show the gap between potential and realised organic keyword traffic. To obtain potential keyword traffic I'm using the Google Adwords keyword tool to derive local monthly search volumes for exact keyword matches. To get the realised data I'm using Google Analytics. However, to get the I'm confused as to which is the best way of getting a comparable metric from Google Analytics (GA). I was using custom reports and the 'organic searches' metric. However, this provides different values to a standard report selecting non-paid search in the default advanced segments. What is the best report/metric in GA to use for both organic and paid search volumes that would be comparable to the Google Adwords keyword tool. Thanks Neil
Reporting & Analytics | | mccormackmorrison0