Why Aren’t My PPC Clicks The Same As My PPC Visits?

Yes, this is a good question and one that here at Cozy Digital we get asked by our clients on a regular basis, and it seems is a common question for Google too.

Rightly so, many advertisers use Google analytics to analyse their PPC traffic in more detail because, let’s be honest, the AdWords software platform just doesn’t cut the mustard when it comes to in-depth analysis of your visitors behaviour. This makes sense as this is not what this tool is designed for, Google analytics is.

So why are your clicks not equal to your visitors? Although it is unlikely to ever be exactly the same, you can reduce the number of discrepancies you see in these two metrics. Over at Google’s solutions for Southeast Asia blog they explain in detail how to reduce these differences to a minimum.

It seems that this may be due to incorrect implementations of Google analytics. Google goes into great detail in how to check that everything is set up as it should be.

One of the reasons that these metrics can be different is if someone clicks on an ad then gets redirected to another URL then the AdWords auto-tagging gets removed and then Google cannot track it. Google recommends that you contact your webmaster to append the gclid parameter (that’s the part of the URL that qualifies the visit as an AdWords click) to your URL’s. If this is not possible then Google recommends you consider removing the redirect altogether.

Another reason may be that a user clicks your ad multiple times in one session and although Google Analytics will count this as many clicks, but will only count it as one visit.

Finally, a visitor may visit another page on your website after clicking an ad before the analytics code get a chance to load or they may click the STOP button on their browser. Google does claim that AdWords does filter invalid clicks whereas Google analytics does not.

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About Graham Lyons

Graham is the SEO and Social Media Marketing Manager at Cozy Digital and the editor of the Cozy Digital Blog as well as contributing content for most of our social outlets like Facebook, Twitter and G+. Graham has been working in, and writing for the SEO / SMM industry since 2001 and is still as dedicated and passionate today as he was when he opened his first Website Design, Ecommerce and SEO company in 2004. You can connect with Graham and Cozy Digital via the social media links below:

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