Analytics Advisor, what do you feel could be the problem here? Is my Analytics code out of date, has some bug occurred? Or, perhaps I'm just not seeing my organic listings and am in fact getting organic traffic? Thanks in advance everyone for your help/comments.
Dave.
...when I check the SERP's for the terms I'm supposedly getting clicks for, my website does not show up
I use Adwords for one of my businesses and have Google Analytics installed. I have never done any SEO on the website, purely PPC driven. I do have some "backlinks", but mainly just from scraper type websites. Starting May 1st, I have noticed that I am supposedly getting a couple hundred clicks per day from Organic Google searches. However, when I check the SERP's for the terms I'm supposedly getting clicks for, my website does not show up.Analytics Advisor, what do you feel could be the problem here? Is my Analytics code out of date, has some bug occurred? Or, perhaps I'm just not seeing my organic listings and am in fact getting organic traffic? Thanks in advance everyone for your help/comments.
Dave.
Hi davewray,
There really isn't any way to spoof organic traffic in your Analytics reports; chances are that you're actually getting organic traffic!
I concur with the idea of checking your local logfiles as well. Those will show the full search term. Additionally, using the Search Engines report will show you organic search terms as well.
I hope this helps,
GAA
There really isn't any way to spoof organic traffic in your Analytics reports;
Monitoring organic traffic relies on user-supplied data, and so is very easy to spoof. But it would be a rare-enough thing I suppose.
IMO it's more likely that the results you see when looking at the referring URL are not the same as the results seen by your users: you have to account for geo-location, personalisation and different data centres. These days, neither SERPs or URLs are a constant thing ;)
The other possibility is that your PPC traffic is not being tracked correctly, and is being confused with organic searches. Presumably, you're using some kind of tracking URLs in your paid campaigns?
[edited by: Receptional_Andy at 10:20 pm (utc) on May 15, 2008]
Are you only using Adwords? Is the organic traffic showing up as Google or other Engines? If other, them might not be tagged with the correct UTM variable.
We've had tracking issues in GA when once page was missing the code. They would come to a page with the code, click to the page with the missing code, then go back to a page that had code, and GA started double counting visitors and placing traffic in incorrect buckets.
I'll check the logfiles to see if it concurs with the GA stats.
And no, there is no corresponding drop in PPC clicks...those are pretty bang on, plus or minus a few.
You're right, up til now all traffic had been PPC generated. Some of the organic phrases I'm getting clicks for I'm not sure how I could even be ranking for them?
It could be coding/tracking issues, I'll have to check into that.
I do supposedly get organic traffic from the other engines as well. I guess I'll have to do some digging!
Thanks all for your help/comments..I'll keep you posted.
Monitoring organic traffic relies on user-supplied data, and so is very easy to spoof. But it would be a rare-enough thing I suppose.IMO it's more likely that the results you see when looking at the referring URL are not the same as the results seen by your users: you have to account for geo-location, personalisation and different data centres. These days, neither SERPs or URLs are a constant thing ;)
The other possibility is that your PPC traffic is not being tracked correctly, and is being confused with organic searches. Presumably, you're using some kind of tracking URLs in your paid campaigns?
Good point! My main point was that it's unlikely in this certain situation, but I absolutely stand corrected. Thanks!
Again, another good point - if your tagging is set up incorrectly, Analytics will report all traffic from a search engine as coming from organic. This problem is solved with Auto Tagging in AdWords; however, it does require manually building tracking URLs with other PPC platforms.
For Analytics, you can build those URLs with our URL Builder tool, which can be found in our help center.
[edited by: GAnalyticsAdvisor at 3:25 pm (utc) on May 19, 2008]
Could this traffic be caused by AVG's LinkScanner
As far as I'm aware the AVG tool will only scan results pages the user is looking at, and besides doesn't send a referrer, so I don't think that can be the explanation here.
