Why my WMT is showing more clicks than my Google Analytics Organic Search Traffic?

[Muhammad_Jabali]

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

[Muhammad_Jabali]

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

[Muhammad_Jabali]

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

[JaneCopland]

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.

[RobertFisher]

Nice explanation William.

[WilliamKammer]

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/