Difference between GWT and GA average position
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Does anyone know why there would be a difference in average position from GA and GWT? I am seeing completely different results for the same date ranges. Thank you!
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Thank you so much for that information - So if I was focusing on the most accurate/current rankings specifically in Google, the GWT is the data I should be looking at - correct? Thank you!!
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Here is googles answer:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1213138
Basically:
- Google Webmaster tools and Google Analytics define "keywords" differently
- GWT and GA have slightly different lags in how data is aggregated.
- GWT and GA are different datasets. GA sees all traffic to your site (even from other search engines), but it only sees users that have properly triggered your on-page javascript. GWT sees only data from google's search engine.
Some people have tried to account for all of the above factors, and still couldn't get the numbers to correlate. @salmoni wrote a good peice about it: http://www.analyticsseo.com/blog/consistency-googles-rankings
I hope that helps.
-Jason
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