How to interpret search "clicks" in GA?

[Gavin.Atkinson]

I am trying to make some sense of the data in the "Landing Pages" report under "Search Engine Optimization" in GA versus the data under the "Landing Pages" report in "Behavior | Site Content".

For example, the SEO report says my page http://www.asiantraveltips.com/blog/bangkok-skytrain-bts-mrt-lines/ received 22,000 search impressions in the past 30 days and 900 "clicks" (12.42%). What are these "clicks" when the Content "Landing Pages" report says the same page only got 382 "sessions" in the same period???

What are these "clicks" if not clicks on the search results link that should be reflected in landing page sessions on the corresponding page?

[Gavin.Atkinson]

Just a quick PS here Charles, this is a new segment I've added to my site called "image traffic" that looks at the traffic I receive from Google Search (inspired by your answer).

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[Gavin.Atkinson]

Yes Matt, he did. I only just saw this response - I must have missed the email notification. Thank you Charles for all the work you put into this and for finding the answer. I really appreciate it. Love learning something new.

[MattRoney]

Hi there Customer.Insight.Team!

Did Charles answer your question?

[seomozinator]

Ok, my friend. I have an answer for you

I have attached three screenshots. So, #1 - the problem is that under Acquisition->SEO->Landing pages amount of clicks include not only Google Web Search, but also Google Image Search. So, you can see that you got 900 clicks on image search results from the page of skytrain lines and only 90 from web results. Google doesn't track traffic through image search. (Good post with good sources on this matter)

#2 - I checked google organic traffic for your website - it's 2268 sessions.

#3 - I filtered out images search from reporting results - I got 1900 clicks.

Here you go. Number match (at least these are normal, expected numbers). Clicks are less than sessions, because sessions include cached, repetative etc results.

Problem Solved

asian-1.jpg asian-2.jpg asian-3.jpg

[Gavin.Atkinson]

OK, I think these are the screens you want to see, but I also gave you access to my GA so you could take a look directly.

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[seomozinator]

UPDATE: I might have an idea why it's happening:

All data, displayed under Acquisition->SEO->Landing Pages is taken from connected Google Webmaster Tools (or they call it now Search Console). So, if you have several properties from GMT connected to the same Google analytics account, you gonna be getting THE SUM of data from all GMT accounts.

If I look at my GA and GMT accounts now, the data (clicks and impressions) I see is matching with less than 1% margin. So, if that's not happening in your case, you might have several GMT accounts connected!(?)

Attach the screenshot of GMT too, make sure to check impressions and view by page url (radio button things).

[seomozinator]

Ok, my friend. Something reeeeally weird going on. My first guess - improper tagging. And this is why I think so:

I see that in all traffic by channels there were 2810 sessions for organic search. At the same time under SEO->Landing pages the number states 7549 clicks. That's like 2.5 times difference!

Please, do this: do the same screenshots as above, but with time period ending on August 18 (so those two last days, which are not included under SEO don't dilute data). Also, when you are taking screeshot of Behaviour->Site content->Landing Pages, add secondary dimension Source, so we see actual number of sessions coming from google.

If you want, you can give me restricted access to your google analytics, so I can look at it directly: [email protected]

[Gavin.Atkinson]

Not using Adwords or segments/filters on this account. Here are the screen shots you asked for. Don't worry about the drop off in traffic, that's just a link promo ending.

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[seomozinator]

Hi there.

This is very interesting. I manage about 30 different accounts and I don't see mismatches in any of them. Now, my only thoughts on this matter are: under "Search Engine Optimization" no data is available from most recent two days, at the same time it shows data only for top 1000 daily landing pages. Also you can't use segments in this report, so, maybe your data under "Behavior" is being automatically filtered by segment?

Also keep in mind that under "Search Engine Optimization" clicks do not include traffic from adwords. So, if your website gets a lot of adwords traffic, that might be the reason.

Would you mind leaving screenshots of those three pages (Acquisition->SEO->landing pages, sorted by clicks; Behaviour->site content->landing pages;Aquisition->all traffic->channels)?

[ClaytonJ]

Is Adwords linked up?

Have you tagged the landing pages of your display campaigns using URL builder https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033867?hl=en-GB thereafter the correct data should be translated into GA.

Hope that assists.