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/
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
-
A huge spike in traffic, mainely from social and organic
Hi there, We see this huge spike in traffic to our home page for almost a week now. When I check the source I see a crazy spike in Facebook traffic (25,630% change!!), Twitter and organic. The spike in traffic is to our home page alone. The bounce rate is much higher than avg. and time on page is shorter. Also, no. of new visitors to the site is higher than average. The traffic is obviously low quality and is hurting our site's statistics. Any ideas as to why this is happening? Many thanks in advance, Gal
Reporting & Analytics | | tomedess0 -
Google Analytics Page Metrics and Redirects
Hi All- Context: A site has been redesigned. Pages were renamed in the process. Problem: It's very hard to compare before and after metrics because the page URLs are not the same. Question: Anyone know how to do this in Google Analytics? I'm hoping there's some simple trick I just don't know about. D
Reporting & Analytics | | DonnaDuncan0 -
Google Analytics shows most referrers as "Direct" -- What are some better tools?
Very often Google Analytics will show 50-90% of our referrers as (direct) which is not very helpful. Are there other tools out there that will provide a clearer breakdown of what other websites are sending us our traffic? Specifically, I want to be able to be able to tell who are the top traffic referrers to my top performing pages on my site for the last 30 days. (I want to be able to study this on a per-page basis.) Thanks in advance!
Reporting & Analytics | | Brand_Psychic0 -
Google Analytics is not showing me eCommerce Section Details for My Online eCommerce Website!
From Last few days we are not able to find any details from eCommerce section at Good Analytics account for our eCommerce website i.e order detail, Price e.t.c. Please any one can suggest proper solution for this query?
Reporting & Analytics | | yuvastyle0 -
View entrance keyworsd for a subpage in google analytics
I have an element from ringcentral that is tracked by google analytics, yet for the life of me I cannot figure out to how to view the entrance keywords to that element. I can view the search metric and see which keywords and how many visits from each keyword onto the site in general, but how do I see which keywords were actually responsible for this 'click to call' code which has GA? I can see the total number of clicks into that code, but not which keywords led to it.
Reporting & Analytics | | ilyaelbert0 -
Conflicting Analytics: Getclicky vs. Google Analytics
Removal of an old getclicky code (and installation of new tracking code) from my site after some changes resolved inaccuracies in my page view/bounce rate information. Prior to adding the correct getclicky code, getclicky was showing 95% plus bounce rate on my site. I knew this was wrong because GA showed around 40%. Ironically, now that my getclicky account is working (showing a 30% bounce rate), GA bounce rate is steadily climbing. Is it best to just stick with one analytics account so that the codes don't conflict? Is it possible to have two accurate analytics accounts at the same time?
Reporting & Analytics | | JSOC0 -
Track Individual Organic Orders In Google Analytics
I was wondering if there is a way to track information about the individual order in google analytics. Currently I can see all of the organic traffic, rev, transactions, etc, but I would like to be able to know what those individual order numbers are, as well as be able to place test orders to see if organic tracking is correctly working. Does anyone know of a good blog walkthrough for this, or have any suggestions? Thanks (again individual organic order data not all data from a specific search engine or keyword).
Reporting & Analytics | | Gordian0 -
Organic search on google
Hi there, pl take a look at this link, there is a section which says shared results and has a star against two agencies and once article. can pl someone let me know what those starts are and how to get them? Thank you 🙂 so sorry - the link is http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=digital+mareketing+agency+los+angeles Vijay
Reporting & Analytics | | vijayvasu0