Internet Marketing Services

This post describes a method to identify a mismatch between the clicks from AdWords  and the number of visits you get to the website. Ideally, 100 clicks on your ads should generate 100 visits. However, this is not always the case and there are more reasons for that: multiple clicks on your ads within the 30 minutes session from the same person, 301 redirects or misconfiguration and errors in your Analytics/AdWords account.

If you have a campaign that gets 1000 clicks but only 600 visits to the website, it is most likely that you have a problem, either with your AdWords campaign or with your Analytics tracking code or both. But how do you know how many clicks and visits do you get to the website?

Let’s find. Login into your Analytics account, go to Traffic Source, then AdWords, then Campaigns and click on the Visualize button.

Vizualize Campaign Performance with Google Analytics

Choose Visit for the Y-axis and Clicks for X-axis.

If the PPC clicks and the visits were to be in perfect correlation, all the dots would be aligned along an imaginary green diagonal (the green diagonal doesn’t display in Google Analytics visualizer). In this case something seems to be off limits.

Dots Should Distribute Closely to The Diagonal

In the image above, can you see how the green dot is located around 110 on the X-axis? The corresponding Y-axis position should also be around 110, but in this case is around 50 (the normal position of the green dot should be somewhere near the gray circle). That’s a difference of 60 clicks out of max 120; there may be a few guys clicking on your ads multiple times, but it can’t be that many. So, there should be something wrong with this campaign and you should investigate further. Maybe you’re pointing the destination URL to a 301 redirected landing page, or maybe the website or sections of it were down at that time, that is for your team to investigate.

Take a look at the video below and draw an imaginary diagonal from the bottom left to the higher right corners of the graph. Compared to other dots in the video, the green one doesn’t stay in the correct spot:

Now, if you will do the same for your campaigns you might find the same issue. If you do find it, go and dig deeper into your AdWords and Analytics accounts for missing tracking code, or other errors. Try to think for yourself what could be wrong. If you can’t think of anything, please subscribe to our blog. We will give you some hints in the upcoming posts.

Pitstop Media offers ROI based internet marketing services. If you need help with PPC management or PPC optimization please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We’ve helped companies reduce their paid advertising cost by as much as 48% and increase AdWords conversion rates by as much as 410%. See our internet marketing case studies.