Over the past few years I've taken over a Google Ads (search) campaign for a site in the hospitality sector. What with lockdowns etc they have been changing it a lot, which meant installing proper Event tracking was going to be a repetitive waste of time, but at the end of last year things settled down enough for me to get access to the Analytics and then attach tracking to their various booking & enquiry methods and other expressions of interest via GTM.
It's been two months, so I've just gone in to start collecting some data and have noticed something that has just floored me. This is from Acquisition > Google Ads > Campaigns.
- December: 404 clicks, 137 users, 155 sessions
- January: 406 clicks, 102 users, 108 sessions
If the sessions were closer to the number of clicks then it would be possible to imagine the same user searching hours apart on the same day. But isn't the default duration of a session 30 minutes? And isn't Google supposed to not bill for additional clicks within that time?
In Analytics, the CPC data and the overall cost reveal in the same report (corroborated by Google Ads info) that we have been billed for every click.
Has anyone else seen anything else like this? Anyone know what's going on?
