Webmaster Tools and Geolocation
-
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?
-
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!
-
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.
-
Hi Glen,
I don't have any specific insight regarding Venezuela, however a few notes:
-
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.
-
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
-
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
-
Webmaster Tools equivalent to Change Default Address found in Analytics
Hello all! We're changing from http to https. In Google Analytics there is an option to change the default address so we keep our historical data. I can't find a similar option in Webmaster Tools though. Do you have to setup a new property or is there an option to change your current one? Thanks in advance!
Reporting & Analytics | | thegrbteam0 -
Can not divide in different properties a domain in Search Console (Webmaster Tools)
Dear Moz Community, I hope you can give me a hand with the following questions. Im in charge of SEO of an ecommerce site in LATAM. It´s service is available in several countries, therefore each country has it subdirectory Eg. /ar /pe /co /bo /cl /br,etc... (in the future we will move to differente ccTLDs). I have been recomended to split or create different Search Console or Webmaster Tools properties (one for each subdirectory) but when Im creating a new property with a subdirectory, lets say www.domain.com/ar, Webmaster tools starts creating a property for www.domain.com/ar/ (NOTICE THE LAST SLASH) and it returns since that page doesn´t exist, what do you recomend me to do? Best wishes, Pablo Lòpez C
Reporting & Analytics | | pablo_carrara0 -
Mismatch between analytics and webmaster tools
Hi, I've noticed that the Queries report in analytics gives a completely different answer (for impressions, clicks, CTR, Avg. position) to webmaster tools. What gives? Which would you use? Thanks, Amelia
Reporting & Analytics | | CommT0 -
Google Webmaster Tools During GA Transition?
I'm working with a client that is launching a new website. Google Webmaster Tools can just be disconnected, then reconnected to the new Google Analytics property, correct? Without any data loss in Webmaster Tools? Thanks! Becky
Reporting & Analytics | | Becky_Converge0 -
Where did the diagnostic tool go in webmaster tools?
I've tried to search this topic on Google and here but I'm flooded with old content from Google on how to use the diagnostic tool. Did they remove this from Google Webmaster Tools?
Reporting & Analytics | | mr_w0 -
Moving to https - Webmaster Tools
Okay so I've moved a site I work on to https finally... wasn't easy, but I won't go into the whys and hows of that. Everything is working fine on the site and my rankings are holding steady but when I went into the GWT today I noticed that my main site (www.domain.com) has lost inquiry and traffic data almost entirely. So I quickly added and verified the https://www.domain.com URL (even though it doesn't ask for the protocol when adding a site) and saw the traffic.. kind of. Only 2 inquiries and a few pages indexed. Now I realize I need to submit a new sitemap and am currently working on that but don't know which account to upload it to. Do I really need two GWT sites separately and why is the other one still getting the impressions and clicks? Basically I'm looking for somebody to shed some light on how to handle this migration from a GWT standpoint. I've attached 3 screenshots to illustrate what I'm talking about. Should be obvious what's what to those who read this post. The Analytics shot is to show that I haven't actually lost traffic in this time and eliminate the fear of penalty or anything of the sort. Thanks! wbPpwVw.png YJifLiR.png cRVgqRN.png
Reporting & Analytics | | jesse-landry0 -
Google Webmaster indicates robots.text access error
Seems that Google has not been crawling due to an access issue with our robots.txt
Reporting & Analytics | | jmueller0823
Late 2013 we migrated to a new host, WPEngine, so things might have changed, however this issue appears to be recent. A quick test shows I can access the file. This is the Google Webmaster Tool message: http://www.growth trac dot com/: Googlebot can't access your site January 17, 2014 Over the last 24 hours, Googlebot encountered 62 errors while attempting to access your robots.txt. To ensure that we didn't crawl any pages listed in that file, we postponed our crawl. Your site's overall robots.txt error rate is 8.8% Note the above message says 'over the last 24 hours', however the date is Jan-17 This is the response from our host:
Thanks for contacting WP Engine support! I looked into the suggestions listed below and it doesn't appear that these scenarios are the cause of the errors. I looked into the server logs and I was only able to find 200 server responses on the /robots.txt. Secondly I made sure that the server wasn't over loaded. The last suggestion doesn't apply to your setup on WP Engine. We do not have any leads as to why the errors occurred. If you have any other questions or concerns, please feel free to reach out to us. Google is crawling the site-- should I be concerned? If so, is there a way to remedy this? By the way, our robots file is very lean, only a few lines, not a big deal. Thanks!0 -
Tools For Analysing Backlinks
Does anyone know of a good tool that analyses backlinks? I have already tried Link Research Tools and found it very useful but it is very expensive. Does anyone know of an alternative that does the same thing, i.e. will tell you what links are causing harm to your site?
Reporting & Analytics | | AAttias0