Huge discrepancy in click reporting

Google claims 1500 clicks, my logs show 569

[Psmith0000]

Google claims that there is a way for someone to click through on the content network, and my server not register it as a click. We are running the newest version of Apache 1. Is this possible, and how could that be?

Has anyone else had this experience?

[DamonHD]

Hi,

You can see people coming through to your site with Google in the Referer, or the referring site in the Referer, or some other random rubbish depending on browser, OS, and day-of-week. You get a real mixture.

I would not be at all surprised if only ~30% of the Referer values showed the hand of Google. Is that how you were attempting to detect it?

Note also that if people get a slow response they may cancel their clickthrough LONG before your Web server sees anything, eg because of poor DNS or network connectivity.

Rgds

Damon

[Psmith0000]

Thanks for the info. My logs show a total of 569 google referred visits. My logs also show a total of 1,247 visits for that page during that time period. So that would have to be an enormous amount of people ending the click because their server is too slow.

That is not a good deal for us. I haven't had any business from my six week trial. Granted my product is expensive and the field is crowded, but none of my visits ended in a sale. I paid $2.69 avg. per click. They say 1500. I show 569. Would you pursue with Google?

[Matt Probert]

Or they may be served a cached version of the page from a cache along the way, then your server would never be asked for the page.

Or you may be being ripped off, and there's nothing you can do about it. Just contrast what you pay for advertising with the returns and make a judgement.

Matt

[DamonHD]

Hi,

The numbers you give look plausible to me, especially adding in Matt's cache factor.

I have no reason to believe that G would be telling porkies, but you might ask them to (re-)investigate if any of the clicks look suspicious, eg from a competitor's IP address or one of the egregious "paid-to-surf" sites.

If so then you may (a) get a partial refund and (b) be able to better target/filter your campaign in future (eg adding to your excluded sites list).

Rgds

Damon

[Psmith0000]

Thanks Matt & Damon. I am pursuing it with Google because our web host also thinks it is implausible that there were so many clicks that didn't register. He sent them the Apache raw data logs. We'll see.