Why Clicks and Visits Don’t Match

We recently had a question from a client as to Why Clicks and Visits Don’t Match?

They did not understand why Clicks from Paid Search do not match what is in the Analytics.

We have had this question every now and then over the years, so we thought it would be good to share.

We need to remember that different systems use differing tracking methodologies and that visitor data in the Analytics can be easy to misinterpret due to the many similar terms used in different reports.

Clicks versus Visits

There is an important distinction between Clicks (such as in Google AdWords Campaigns reports) and Visits (in your Analytics reports).

Clicks in your campaign reports indicates how many times your advertisements were clicked by visitors

There are numerous reasons why these two numbers do not match, for example:

• Google AdWords tracks clicks, while Analytics tracks visits. If a user clicks on your ad multiple times within thirty minutes without closing his or her browser, this will be registered by Analytics as one visit to your site, even if the user left your site and then returned shortly after. For example, if a user clicks on your ad once, clicks the ‘back’ button, and then clicks your ad again, AdWords will register two clicks while Analytics will register one visit. This is a common behavior among visitors.

• A visitor may click on your advertisement, but prevent the page from fully loading by navigating to another page or by pressing their browser’s Stop button. In this case, the Analytics tracking code is unable to execute and send tracking data to the Google servers. However, AdWords will still register a click.

• Visitors entering through AdWords may have JavaScript, cookies, or images turned off. If this is the case, Analytics won’t be able to report these visitors, but they will be reported through AdWords. In order for Google Analytics to record a visit, the visitor must have JavaScript, images, and cookies enabled for your website.

Visits versus Visitors

Analytics measures both visits and visitors in your account. Visits represent the number of individual sessions initiated by all the visitors to your site. If a user is inactive on your site for 30 minutes or more, any future activity will be attributed to a new session. Users that leave your site and return within 30 minutes will be counted as part of the original session.

The initial session by a user during any given date range is considered to be an additional visit and an additional visitor. Any future sessions from the same user during the selected time period are counted as additional visits, but not as additional visitors.

We hope this article helps and please feel free to speak to one of our analytics specialists – if you need to know more about your analytics, impelmenting analytics correctly, site perfromance etc and above all monetising your webiste.

Here at Network Intellect, we are one of a few companies that are Analytics Specialists and strongly believe that tracking and analytics is a cornerstone of digital activity.

As we say ” You can Not Manage what you Do Not Measure “