Pandora in Google Analytics

[CalamityJane77]

Hi Mozers, in Google Analytics our ads are registering a 10 second page duration and a 90% bounce rate, which is pretty atrocious. My questions are:

• Organic page duration is 3:15 minutes, and Social + Referral are similar. Yet Pandora is bringing the average time on site way down, to less than a minute. Will those paid ad metrics be factored to the User Behavior and therefore negative affect our overall rankings? In other words does Google now see our page duration as less than a minute?
• The Pandora rep says that Google Analytics and Pandora have "systemic issues" such that GA is very inaccurate with Pandora metrics. I find that difficult to believe. Any insights here?

Thanks all! Jane

[Joe_Stoffel]

Hi Jane,

No, you do not have to worry about those paid ad metrics impacting your organic results. As for the "systemic issues" - it appears that discrepancies between GA and Pandora has been going on for some time. Here is a QA post from 2012 about a similar issue between GA and Pandora: https://moz.com/community/q/pandora-advertising-discrepancy

I cannot speak to this issue first hand but thought this comment was worth noting:

"I had a call with a sales rep today and picked his brain for about an hour. His response to my questioning matched the original post on this thread.  In a nutshell, "visits from inside the mobile Pandora app to an external website remain in the app and therefore do not pass the cookie that would trigger a visit." He said there was no solution to this problem and that whoever figures it out would be a billionaire. Um OK.

As the conversation continued, we started to discuss Pandora's advertising role, generally speaking. He kept trying to get me to focus on the impression, not the click. He explained that it was a bit of a misnomer to be considered digital advertising because really they are more in line with traditional radio advertising. The click is added benefit and really the advertiser is paying for the branding and precise geographic and demographic targeting. Unlike traditional radio, you can pick a specific county (even zip code depending on spend), age group, musical tastes and gender and serve the ad. This level of targeting is what you pay for, not the click. And according to the rep, "tracking the success of a Pandora campaign is not necessary (or possible)."

In a nutshell, there is no way to prove that those clicks actually took place. Pandora has no plans to build a robust backend reporting system that would provide advertisers with true data on the performance of the ads."