Stats and Clicks not Matching

[Advisor]

Anyone know why my stats say I got 15 clicks from Google AdWords this month, but Google Adwords says I got 20? I use a special url to track, and it's not matching up. Which of course bothers me as I'm paying for clicks I may not have received. Has anyone else noticed this?

Jill

[markymark]

Are you looking at raw log data, Jill ? If you are looking at some kind of tracker - hitslink or one of those - then those five clicks may have clicked away before the tracking script had fully loaded and recorded their visit.

[Advisor]

It's the data provided by my server. Not a script on the page.

J

[markymark]

Oh, in that case this does seem to be a concern. Give Google a call and see what they say.

[Kal]

I have found this too. If you ask me it seems like some clicks are charged twice - say if the visitor uses the back button after visiting your page - sometimes it seems to charge twice. Weird.

[Alan Perkins]

Difficult to tell from here, but the user is probably viewing a cached copy of your page, either their browser cache or a Web cacheing proxy server, so you are not seeing the hit. But Google is tracking it as they have disabled cacheing on their click-through pages!

[Advisor]

Alan, that could be. Would it make sense even though the google ad goes to the url like this: highrankings.com/?adwords

In other words, if someone had already been to my highrankings.com site and it was in their cache, would that be what they pull up if they used the above link? Seems weird to me.

I'm not worried about it because my volume on adwords is so low. But if I was doing some heavy duty advertising, the numbers are way off and it could add up to a lot!

J

[Alan Perkins]

Normally the ? prevents cacheing but you never know. Try it for yourself. No need to spend anything. Just visit your adwords page directly, then visit somewhere else, then go back to your adwords page (all in the same browser session), then check your logs to see if you got two hits or just one.

If you do get two hits, that doesn't mean that if another user did it (say one behind a firewall or other cacheing proxy) that would also generate two hits (rather than just the one). This is the likeliest cause.