Why my WMT is showing more clicks than my Google Analytics Organic Search Traffic?
-
Hello Everybody,
Can somebody help me figure out this puzzle:
My WMT is showing 6000 clicks, while my Organic Traffic in Google Analytics is showing only 3500 daily ... how is that possible?
Best Regards
-
Hey William,
thats quite a beautiful educating response you have there:-)
helped me a lot in phrasing my problem better and doing a thorough better check.
still looking into the responses in the post you linked to here, and it is quite lots of options, lots of information but a very enlightening post !
Thanks for your referal to that post and will update you if one of the options in the comments there will turn to be explaining what we have.
Best Wishes
-
Hello Jane,
Thanks for your response. we did have other problems with the placing of the GA code in our general page code, but meanwhile its loaded right after the header with only some few Javascript directories in the header.
Added this to the development team requests in order to be sure. though I wonder if this is it.
Will update here if we fix this soon to be sure that firing the GA code first will solve such a problem.
We do deal with targeted audiences with slow internet thats for sure.
So thanks for highlighting this option!
Best Wishes
-
WMT and GA data rarely matches up perfectly, but William's point about the GA code not working for whatever reason is important.
My former agency wrote our own analytics code for one client site. It was a small piece of JavaScript. The client placed it below a very slow-loading piece of conversion rate optimisation JS that took a very long time to load. Most people coming to the website knew what they wanted from the home page quite quickly and we had about 50% of our SEO traffic clicking away from the home page before our code had loaded. As a result, a huge amount of our traffic was missing from our weekly reports: we could only report on those people who'd stayed on the home page for long enough to have our code load, or who had landed on other pages and taken longer to figure out what they wanted or who had come to the page they wanted immediately.
We had our code moved up in the page code. JavaScript processes commands as they appear in the code, so our code loaded "immediately" after it was placed high in the code, and the CRO code did its thing afterwards. Our traffic went back up (after we had been through hours of explaining that rankings and interest had not dropped, so it was absolutely a tracking problem and not a real traffic problem).
Not saying this is happening here, but take a look at the page load times, JS on the page and placement of the GA code, plus raw server logs if you have access to them, and see if there is possibly a tracking problem with GA.
-
Nice explanation William.
-
WMT measures clicks from Google. This data is gathered directly from Google's properties before the visitor sees your website. On the other hand, GA measures traffic based on a script on your website that has to fire and send data back to Google. If this script doesn't fire, no data goes to Google.
There are multiple reasons why this script may not fire, including mistakes during implementation, someone leaving the page before the script loads, browsers that don't load javascript, security programs that block the code from firing, and so on. All of those factors can attribute to variations in data.
I think it's good to use both sources. When you're in a data-driven industry, it's good to collect lots of it
Here is a post that goes a little deeper, the comments are especially intriguing: http://www.notprovided.eu/why-not-use-googles-wmt-data/
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
-
Organic reports showing a URL that isn't in Search Ask Question
In the image I've attached you can see that I have pulled a source/medium > google organic report. I've also made "landing page" my secondary dimension. The first landing page that is showing up is /v3/?slug=fnl, that is this page (https://orders.freshnlean.com/v3/?slug=fnl). You can see that the page has 230 sessions from Sep 3 - 9 and 17 transactions during that same time frame. The only thing is, that landing page is nowhere to be found in the SERPs. So how is it showing up in this report as having received google organic visitors that converted if it's not even in search? 05OclDp
Reporting & Analytics | | tdastru0 -
Double click by Google - whats that all about?
Buongiorno from Latitude 53.92705600 Longitude -1.38481600... Ok ive watched the video, ive read the blog posts but what is Double click by Google? how do i get to use it?
Reporting & Analytics | | Nightwing
http://doubleclickadvertisers.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/digital-marketing-platform-to-win.html Is it a seperate service to Adwords? Questions questions... Any insights welcome 🙂0 -
Organic Traffic down after WordPress switch.
I recently switched our company's website over to Wordpress in February. Organic traffic went down.... http://www.screencast.com/t/dJ0Oeyma5Xs Same content, there are a few different page URLs but most of all it is all the same and I've SEO'd it to pieces. Any thoughts? I can't figure this one out.
Reporting & Analytics | | SteveZero120 -
Google Analytics and DNS change
Our new alumni application is going be tested at domain uva.imodules.com . We are going to collect traffic data with a Google analytics account number UA-884652-XX. So going to uva.imodules.com/myPage.html would send its data to Google Analytics with that account number. Then when it is ready for production we are going to just change the domain name of the application and switch the DNS over to dardencommunity.darden.virginia.edu . So going to dardencommunity.darden.virginia.edu /myPage.html would send its data to Google Analtics with that SAME account number. Aside from having the testing domain data in the same profile are there any other issues/problems we may run into?
Reporting & Analytics | | Darden0 -
Google Analytics set up for non-canonicalized domains
Our client's website is non-canonicalized (www.example.com & example.com load the same thing). Google seems to have made a preference for the www, but canonicalizing to www breaks their Flash website. All we're really trying to do at this time is install Google Analytics for them. What's the smartest way to make sure that both www.example.com and example.com are treated exactly the same by Google Analytics? Google Developers: Domains & Directories states that by default visit data will be separately collected between the two domains, although I found no references to the common www/naked domain issue. In stackoverflow: Does google analytics combine naked domains with the www subdomain? Török Gábor says, "Yes, users will be tracked, but the same visitor coming from www.datalookups.com and datalookups.com will be counted as two different visitors." On the same page, Open SEO says, "This is completely false: www.domain.tld and domain.tld are treaded just the same, and get the same value for the HASH code (the number at the start of each __utm cookie). This an exception: every other subdomain.domain.tld will be handeld as a distinct web site". Can any Analytics experts help me sort this out? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | GOODSIR0 -
Drop in google referral traffic
Hi guys, As we know, GA shows google as traffic source in two ways: google / organic for organic searches and google.TLD / referral for everything else: google groups, base.google.com, static pages, google reader, google image search, google search appliance/mini. What we noticed is that around Oct 20th there's a huge drop of google.TLD / referral traffic to our site. Do you experience something similar? I couldn't find anything Google-related that happened around this specific date. We use GSA for our site search and I'm wondering if this could be the reason - maybe someone from our development team made changes to GSA settings that affected this traffic source. Looking forward to hearing from you! Thanks.
Reporting & Analytics | | lgrozeva0 -
What is the best way to track mobile sites in Google Analytics?
Hello! I am wondering what the pros and cons of using the regular Google Analytics tracking code on a mobile site versus the tracking documentation from Google specifically on it found at http://code.google.com/mobile/analytics/docs/web/ which is still in labs mode. Does the mobile specific tracking have the same features as the regular one to be able to track events and report the same statistics? Thanks for the help on this one!
Reporting & Analytics | | CabbageTree0 -
Why does Google Analytics think PPC traffic is organic?
I have a bastard of a problem... Google Analytics is incorrectly tracking PPC traffic as SEO which is screwing up all my reporting . I don't care for rankings, I care for actual SEO traffic and I can't be sure that what i am seeing is correct which is driving me nuts. Any ideas?
Reporting & Analytics | | Red_Mud_Rookie1