Webtrends and activity by search engines

Reason of the difference between "Activity by Search Engines" and "Activity

[misciab]

Hi, can someone please explain me why Webtrends always shows a great difference between "activity by referring sites" and "activity by search engine"?

Example:

Oct. 2004

Act. by referring sites = Google.it 3,176 visits
Act. by search engines = Google.it 10,159 referrals

Shouldn't these data be quite close, if not the same? Why a referral from G.it doesn't always appear as a visit from G.it?

Googlebot activity in the same period marked 796 visit with 3685 hits, so the difference can't be attributed to the spider.

Thanks
Bye

[cgrantski]

If somebody comes to your site via Google, then backs out and goes back to Google, then goes back into your site again via a click on the Google page, they'll count as one referral (one visit) but two "activities" (two times within that visit that Google was a referrer for a page view).

Same exact statistics for this scenario: someone comes to your site via Google, backs out to Google again, visits another site from the Google results page, backs out from there to Google, clicks on your link again.

Same thing even if they do two Google searches, coming to your site through different keywords, but all within the same visit.

A new visit by that person won't start until a) 30 minutes (or whatever your timeout is) of inactivity happens by them on your site, or b) their IP changes due to ISP proxies and they are being tracked by IP rather than a cookie.

A difference as great as what you are seeing is a little unusual; I'm used to seeing 10-20% on most of my clients. I'd interpret your stats as saying people are doing a lot of comparison shopping.