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
-
How does Google measure page position in Webmasters?
Does anyone know exactly how Google measures page position in Webmaster Tools? For example: In Google Webmaster Tools, we had a product which on the 22/12/15 was at position 7, and then dropped to position 112 on the 30/12/15. It then rose back up to position 7 on the 6/01/16 and then down to position 25 on the 16/01/16. What does this mean and why?
Reporting & Analytics | | CostumeD0 -
Google Analytics shows most referrers as "Direct" -- What are some better tools?
Very often Google Analytics will show 50-90% of our referrers as (direct) which is not very helpful. Are there other tools out there that will provide a clearer breakdown of what other websites are sending us our traffic? Specifically, I want to be able to be able to tell who are the top traffic referrers to my top performing pages on my site for the last 30 days. (I want to be able to study this on a per-page basis.) Thanks in advance!
Reporting & Analytics | | Brand_Psychic0 -
Webmaster Tools Indexed pages vs. Sitemap?
Looking at Google Webmaster Tools and I'm noticing a few things, most sites I look at the number of indexed pages in the sitemaps report is usually less than 100% (i.e. something like 122 indexed out of 134 submitted or something) and the number of indexed pages in the indexed status report is usually higher. So for example, one site says over 1000 pages indexed in the indexed status report but the sitemap says something like 122 indexed. My question: Is the sitemap report always a subset of the URLs submitted in the sitemap? Will the number of pages indexed there always be lower than or equal to the URLs referenced in the sitemap? Also, if there is a big disparity between the sitemap submitted URLs and the indexed URLs (like 10x) is that concerning to anyone else?
Reporting & Analytics | | IrvCo_Interactive1 -
Have You Ever Gotten False or Odd Notifications from Google Webmaster Tools?
I just got an email for one of my client websites from Google Webmaster Tools letting me know that the Google Bot could not access the website? The notification indicated that there may be a robots.txt issue that prevented crawling, but that they would try something to crawl it again. In this situation, we had just created a new Webmaster Tools account for the client, and there were (are) two GWT accounts now for the website, one that is incorrectly set to http://clientwebsite.com and the other that is set to www.clientwebsite.com. One of them reports zero errors, and the other reports an odd crawl error. Anyone encountered this type of thing before?
Reporting & Analytics | | williammarlow0 -
My Google Webmaster Search Queries are 0??!!
For the past 2 days Google Webmaster has recorded 0 search queries to my site, but traffic seems stable. Any ideas about why this is happening and what I should do about it? Or is it a Google glitch I should not be concerned about (hoping for this option)
Reporting & Analytics | | theLotter0 -
Webmaster Tools Showing Non-Existent Rankings
Hello World(pun intended) I am seeing a phenomenal keyword phrase ranking at an avg. 9.9 on google webmaster tools but not actually seeing the ranking in reality. If i did I would be rich. Does this mean I will soon see this ranking?
Reporting & Analytics | | TheGrid0 -
How do you set www vs non-www in Bing Webmaster Tools?
A site of mine is showing as example.com instead of www.example.com in Bing and Yahoo. I know where to set the preferred domain to www in Google Webmaster Tools, but I can't seem to find that function in Bing Webmaster Tools. Can someone please point me in the right direction?
Reporting & Analytics | | DentalPlanSEO0 -
Google Keyword Tool versus Google Analytics
Hi I'm trying to establish a methodology to best show the gap between potential and realised organic keyword traffic. To obtain potential keyword traffic I'm using the Google Adwords keyword tool to derive local monthly search volumes for exact keyword matches. To get the realised data I'm using Google Analytics. However, to get the I'm confused as to which is the best way of getting a comparable metric from Google Analytics (GA). I was using custom reports and the 'organic searches' metric. However, this provides different values to a standard report selecting non-paid search in the default advanced segments. What is the best report/metric in GA to use for both organic and paid search volumes that would be comparable to the Google Adwords keyword tool. Thanks Neil
Reporting & Analytics | | mccormackmorrison0