Organic traffic vs. GWT data
-
Hi, how are you?
I'm having a question becasue of an inconsistency between the data GWT gives and the one GA gives me.
When I see the ammount of clics GWT tells me in february, it says 32850. When I go to Channels --> Organic Search, it says 51014. The difference is really big!
Do you happen to know why this huge gap between data?
-
Ah! That would explain it!
Thanks!
-
There's a specific quirk of Webmaster Tools that most folks aren't aware of, Ariel. Google themselves tell us that Webmaster Tools will only report on the top 2000 queries to your site. So any clicks from the keywords past 2000 won't be recorded in Webmaster Tools but will show up in Analytics as usual. Here's Google's actual quote:
“Webmaster Tools shows data for the top 2,000 queries that returned your site at least once or twice in search results in the selected period."
I'm betting this accounts for pretty well all of the discrepancy in the numbers you're seeing. Analytics is always the more accurate source for information about actual visits, because it's recording what's actually happening on your site. Webmaster Tools is just Google showing you some of what they see happening in the search pages themselves.
Hope that helps explain it?
Paul
P.S. The trick to getting around this limitation is to verify subfolders/categories of your site as additional sites in Webmaster Tools. You'll then see up to 2000 queries for each of those smaller areas of your site, so less likely to run over the limit.)
-
One of my brilliant strategists may have figured out the discrepancy:
Why doesn't Webmaster Tools data match Google Analytics data?
Webmaster Tools data may differ from the data displayed in other tools, such as Google Analytics. Possible reasons for this include:
- Webmaster Tools does some additional data processing—for example, to handle duplicate content and visits from robots—that may cause your stats to differ from stats listed in other sources. Some tools, such as Google Analytics, track traffic only from users who have enabled JavaScript in their browser.
- Google Analytics tracks visits only to pages which include the correctly configured Analytics Javascript code. If pages on the site don't have the code, Analytics will not track visits to those pages. Visits to pages without the Analytics tracking code will, however, be tracked in Webmaster Tools if users reach them via search results or if Google crawls or otherwise discovers them.
- Some tools define "keywords" differently. For example:
- The Keywords page in Webmaster Tools displays the most significant words Google found on your site.
- The Keywords tool in Google Adwords displays the total number of user queries for that keyword across the web.
- Analytics uses the term "keywords" to describe both search engine queries and AdWords paid keywords.
- The Webmaster Tools Search Queries page lists shows the total number of keyword search queries in which your page's listing was seen in search results, and this is a smaller number. Also, Webmaster Tools rounds search query data to one or two significant digits.
-
Just Google traffic, in fatc, just organic google traffic.
Free search engine traffic is 51102. But from those, only 31.418 are new visitors.
GWT says I had 32.850 clics. Could this be it? It only counts new visitors?
-
Hi Ariel,
From my experience it's usually pretty close, albeit still an estimate. When you go into GA are you looking at just Google traffic or ALL organic? That might make for a smaller discrepancy.
Jim
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
-
Decline in Traffic
Our company is a full service law firm with a main website and 6 microsites relevant to each practise area. Over the last 2 years, we have had significant traffic growth and ranked well in SERP, conversions were good and everything was tracking along nicely. Come January 2019, the traffic on 2 of our microsites have dropped by 20% and is not recovering. We have done a site audit and there are no issues with the website, we are still ranking #1 in SERP for our targeted search terms but the traffic just isn't there. Has anyone else with legal websites had this issue or can provide insight into the drop in traffic? It just doesn't make sense why all of a sudden the traffic isn't there anymore. Any advice on what other actions we can take to try and find the issue would be appreciated.
Reporting & Analytics | | monique-plaw0 -
If website users don't accept GDPR cookie consent, does that prevent GA-GTM from tracking pageviews and any traffic from that user that would cause significant traffic decreases?
I've been doing a lot research on GDPR impact and implementation with GTM-GA for clients, but it's been 12 months since GDPR has gone live I haven't found anything on how GA traffic has been impacted if users don't accept cookie consent. However, I'm personally seeing GA accounts taking huge losses in traffic since implementing GDPR cookie solutions (because GTM/GA tags aren't firing until cookies are accepted). Is it common for websites to see significant decreases in traffic due to too many users not accepting cookie consent? Are there alternative solutions to avoid traffic loss like that and still maintain GDPR compliance? It seems to me that the industry underestimated how many people won't accept cookie consent. Most of the documentation and articles around GDPR's start (May 2018) didn't foresee or cover that aspect properly, everything seems to be technically focused with the assumption that if implemented properly most people would accept cookie consent, but I'm personally not seeing that trend and it's destroying GA data (lost traffic, minimal source attribution, inaccurate behavior data, etc). Thanks.
Reporting & Analytics | | Kickboard2 -
Why is Indeed.com traffic appearing as organic in Google Analytics?
A large number of sessions in my client's Google Analytics account appear to come from medium: organic and source:Indeed. Since I'm focused on SEO for this project, I'd prefer that Indeed be treated as referral traffic. Any ideas for fixing this issue? Also, and I'm sure the answer is no, is there a way to fix the past data in Google Analytics that has already reported Indeed as an organic medium?
Reporting & Analytics | | Kevin_P0 -
Any solution to low search traffic on weekend
Hi. all, https://www.babyment.com is content website. our search traffic always shows a dip on weekend (friday to sunday), anyone has idea why it is like this? and is there a solution to this? or this is a just normal? Thank you.
Reporting & Analytics | | melvinwu0 -
.com site referral traffic to ccTLDs
We have 7 international domains set up along with our main .com site. All of the ccTLds are showing their main referral traffic as coming from the .com site in GA, and most of those being from mobile. Each site is set up correctly with geo-targeting and hreflang tags. Has anyone experienced this before?
Reporting & Analytics | | ggpaul5620 -
Google Analytics: How to Track Blog Traffic that Enter the Purchase Funnel?
I've been trying to figure this out for awhile, but I have had no luck. The current ecommerce store that I work for is trying to find out how to track how many people coming in via the blog are converting/buying. The site lives on Magento and the blog is on wordpress and they both use the same Google Analytics code. Site URL: http://website.com/ Blog URL: http://website.com/blog Is there anyway to do this so you can see which landing pages are driving conversions? If not, Is it possible to set up Google Analytics to show conversions and revenue coming from people who enter through blog directory?
Reporting & Analytics | | Erik-M0 -
Google Analytics Organic search queries aren't being updated, even though I'm still seeing results in all our typical results pages.
We pushed some new changes to the site and Google Analytics is no longer updating the Organic Search queries listing, even though traffic is consistent and and we're still landing results in all our typical keyword searches. Any ideas?
Reporting & Analytics | | unclekaos0 -
SEOMoz & GWT crawl error conflicting info
Site im working on has zero crawl errors according to SEOMoz (it did previously have lots since ironed out) but now looking at GWebmaster Tools saying 5000 errors. Date of those are not that recent but Webmaster Tools line graph of errors still showing aprox 5000 up to yesterday There is an option to bulk action/tick them all as fixed so thinking/hoping GWT just keeping a historical record that can now be deleted since no longer applicable. However i'm not confident this is the case since still showing on the line graph. Any ideas re this anomalous info (can i delete and forget in GWT) ? Also side question I take it its not possible to link a GA property with a GWT account if created with different logins/accounts ? Many Thanks Dan
Reporting & Analytics | | Dan-Lawrence0