Adwords & Analytics Different Product Listing Results

[instinctive]

Hi

We have recently set up a Product Listings ad campaign via AdWords and have seen some impressive initial figures in our AdWords account. However, when viewing data from the same period in Analytics it shows completely different statistics.

For example, from 1st-16th June, AdWords shows 604 clicks and 29 conversions from our Product Listings campaign but Google Analytics only shows 23 clicks and 0 conversions across the same period.

Any ideas why these variations show? Is there any additional tracking code that needs to be inserted at all?

Thanks

[JasmineA]

I'm not completely familiar with how PLAs are incorporated into GA. When you say the conversions are coming back as organic traffic - is it for brand or non-brand?

If you're analyzing the data in GA by the last non-direct channel attribution then this could definitely have an impact on how many conversions appear if the funnel is more complicated.

Are your items rather expensive? Is there a longer research phase to your products?

[instinctive]

Hi Peter

Thanks for your input, we already use utm tagging for our regular PPC campaigns but don't have it set up for the PLA campaign. Does this need to be set up within Merchant Centre for the specific products or can it be done via AdWords?Thanks

Leon

[peeveezee]

Hi Leon

Might be an idea to look at some sample urls. We've seen this issue where redirects are in place and they have broken the gclid autotagging. You could also add some utm link tagging (https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033867?hl=en-GB) to provide additonal tracking.

Best regards,

Peter

[instinctive]

Hi Branden

As usual there have always been slight discrepancies between the two sets of figures before but none anywhere near to this.

After looking into this a bit further it looks like the traffic that is being sent via the PLA campaign is being shown as Organic traffic in GA, any ideas on why this would be the case at all?

In reference to your questions - we have used the auto targeting option to set up the PLA campaign, our Analytics code is on every page, there are minor discrepancies in our regular PPC campaigns (5-10%) and yes the problem does seem to be isolated to the PLA campaign.

Thanks

[Branden_S]

There is definitely something going on. AdWords & Analytics numbers are usually off by a few %, but not 95%.  My guess is that you are missing data from Analytics, since its numbers are much lower than AdWords.

did you enable auto tagging in AdWords?  Is your Analytics code on all of the pages in the funnel?  are your Analytics conversion goals setup?  Are you seeing a discrepancy in your adwords search campaigns? ...is this problem isolated to your PLA campaign?