Webmaster Tools and Geolocation

[evansluke]

Our site gets a significant amount of traffic from Venezuela, about 9% based on our Google Analytics (the US being 63%). According to Webmaster Tools we get 48% of our clicks from Venezuela. That discrepancy is massive, considering we are an English site. My theory is that they are not allowed/capable of using secure search in Venezuela for some legal reason and therefore their searches are much more 'visible'. Does anyone have any insight?

[evansluke]

Thanks for the interest. The domain is Covers.com (think: the ESPN for people who sports bet) and there is good reason why Venezuelans would visit since they are crazy for baseball, but the numbers are so wildly out of proportion there must be more at play here. I can telly you that from a sales standpoint and from a participation in contests and the forums that Venezuelans are not over represented in site use.

Another factor could be size perhaps? We serve about 1.2 Billion pages a year, and have reached the extent of Google Analytics free product long ago. We don't have the Premium yet though.

We did have the geo-target set in WMT to 'undefined' but recently have switched to 'United States'

Thanks again for any help!

[gfiorelli1]

Hi Glen,

in order to offer you a more credible answer, it would be great if you could share the name of your domain that is having such an unexpected success from Venezuela.

There can be many reasons, many of which not all related to SEO, that could explain those spikes of organic traffic from Venezuela. For instance, is your site selling some specific product? It may be - knowing how in Venezuela is almost impossible to find even basic product if not in the black market - that your product is highly demanded there, hence searched. Also... consider that the wealthy Venezuelan class speaks English and uses it (and it has also a good spending costume).

However, you can try to understand the nature of the sessions analyzing the users' metrics. For instance, is it a traffic that stays on the site and visit more pages, or it just enters and bounce out? Do you even saw any kind of conversion from Venezuelan sessions.

ASAP you give us more information, I and all the people here surely will be able to help you better.

[Mark_Ginsberg]

Hi Glen,

I don't have any specific insight regarding Venezuela, however a few notes:

1. In general, Analytics data is viewed in the industry as MUCH more accurate than Webmaster Tools data.  If Analytics is implemented correctly (I'd start by checking this with the Google Tag Assistant plugin for Chrome), then I'd simply assume an error in WMT reporting unless I saw other evidence that might convince me that WMT is correct.

2. I think you may have misunderstood how secure search works.  Secure search doesn't mean that the visits aren't tracking, it just means that you won't get keyword data for those visits in Analytics.  If your hypothesis that you have way more visibility in Venezuela is correct, that would show in Analytics.

Hope this helps! Feel free to message me if you have any other questions

Mark