How to interpret search "clicks" in GA?
-
I am trying to make some sense of the data in the "Landing Pages" report under "Search Engine Optimization" in GA versus the data under the "Landing Pages" report in "Behavior | Site Content".
For example, the SEO report says my page http://www.asiantraveltips.com/blog/bangkok-skytrain-bts-mrt-lines/ received 22,000 search impressions in the past 30 days and 900 "clicks" (12.42%). What are these "clicks" when the Content "Landing Pages" report says the same page only got 382 "sessions" in the same period???
What are these "clicks" if not clicks on the search results link that should be reflected in landing page sessions on the corresponding page?
-
Just a quick PS here Charles, this is a new segment I've added to my site called "image traffic" that looks at the traffic I receive from Google Search (inspired by your answer).
ef28008b890400b0d9938303c9df3050 d13240144d12a100dd3ff1e8868227db
-
Yes Matt, he did. I only just saw this response - I must have missed the email notification. Thank you Charles for all the work you put into this and for finding the answer. I really appreciate it. Love learning something new.
-
Hi there Customer.Insight.Team!
Did Charles answer your question?
-
Ok, my friend. I have an answer for you
I have attached three screenshots. So, #1 - the problem is that under Acquisition->SEO->Landing pages amount of clicks include not only Google Web Search, but also Google Image Search. So, you can see that you got 900 clicks on image search results from the page of skytrain lines and only 90 from web results. Google doesn't track traffic through image search. (Good post with good sources on this matter)
#2 - I checked google organic traffic for your website - it's 2268 sessions.
#3 - I filtered out images search from reporting results - I got 1900 clicks.
Here you go. Number match (at least these are normal, expected numbers). Clicks are less than sessions, because sessions include cached, repetative etc results.
Problem Solved
-
OK, I think these are the screens you want to see, but I also gave you access to my GA so you could take a look directly.
7d50a1cd02167a908c717ab7c2bd2b2c efd3fb53f6a803f49d5f7bccfe065856 d71ea821b30d58d6ca0e7c9ea72b7c7d
-
UPDATE: I might have an idea why it's happening:
All data, displayed under Acquisition->SEO->Landing Pages is taken from connected Google Webmaster Tools (or they call it now Search Console). So, if you have several properties from GMT connected to the same Google analytics account, you gonna be getting THE SUM of data from all GMT accounts.
If I look at my GA and GMT accounts now, the data (clicks and impressions) I see is matching with less than 1% margin. So, if that's not happening in your case, you might have several GMT accounts connected!(?)
Attach the screenshot of GMT too, make sure to check impressions and view by page url (radio button things).
-
Ok, my friend. Something reeeeally weird going on. My first guess - improper tagging. And this is why I think so:
I see that in all traffic by channels there were 2810 sessions for organic search. At the same time under SEO->Landing pages the number states 7549 clicks. That's like 2.5 times difference!
Please, do this: do the same screenshots as above, but with time period ending on August 18 (so those two last days, which are not included under SEO don't dilute data). Also, when you are taking screeshot of Behaviour->Site content->Landing Pages, add secondary dimension Source, so we see actual number of sessions coming from google.
If you want, you can give me restricted access to your google analytics, so I can look at it directly: [email protected]
-
Not using Adwords or segments/filters on this account. Here are the screen shots you asked for. Don't worry about the drop off in traffic, that's just a link promo ending.
34127269ea9643fa1561a37f614a01e2 9f5c97d53a4620c6a9cece8594a65f10 af8df768ea256db65bd05131b0f37a75
-
Hi there.
This is very interesting. I manage about 30 different accounts and I don't see mismatches in any of them. Now, my only thoughts on this matter are: under "Search Engine Optimization" no data is available from most recent two days, at the same time it shows data only for top 1000 daily landing pages. Also you can't use segments in this report, so, maybe your data under "Behavior" is being automatically filtered by segment?
Also keep in mind that under "Search Engine Optimization" clicks do not include traffic from adwords. So, if your website gets a lot of adwords traffic, that might be the reason.
Would you mind leaving screenshots of those three pages (Acquisition->SEO->landing pages, sorted by clicks; Behaviour->site content->landing pages;Aquisition->all traffic->channels)?
-
Is Adwords linked up?
Have you tagged the landing pages of your display campaigns using URL builder https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033867?hl=en-GB thereafter the correct data should be translated into GA.
Hope that assists.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Search Keywords, Meta Keywords and Meta Descriptions; Keeping Webmaster Tools Current
What are Search Keywords, Meta Keywords and Meta Descriptions? What exactly is the difference between them and which one is more important? In regards to Webmaster Tools, if we delete a page or a product, it still shows up in Search Analytics. How can we update Webmaster Tools so as to keep it current with our website? Lastly, again in regards to Webmaster Tools, in Search Analytics. At the moment we put relevant queries into the Meta Description of low ranking pages, in order to raise the position of the page. Is this the right way to handle queries? Should we be putting the queries into the Meta Description or the Meta Keywords?
Reporting & Analytics | | CostumeD0 -
Google Analytics shows most referrers as "Direct" -- What are some better tools?
Very often Google Analytics will show 50-90% of our referrers as (direct) which is not very helpful. Are there other tools out there that will provide a clearer breakdown of what other websites are sending us our traffic? Specifically, I want to be able to be able to tell who are the top traffic referrers to my top performing pages on my site for the last 30 days. (I want to be able to study this on a per-page basis.) Thanks in advance!
Reporting & Analytics | | Brand_Psychic0 -
Disparity between analytics click and WMT clicks.
There's no correlation between click in the 'search queries' report in WMT and analytics. Analytics organic google traffic is over double what is shown in webmaster tools. When I look at the graphs over the last 30 days in each they look similar its just that analytics is showing more traffic than WMT. I've checked I only have the analytics code once on the page. What could be causing this?
Reporting & Analytics | | SamCUK0 -
Inurl:login.aspx + "register" "retrieve password" + intext:employment
Someone came to my website with this keyword a few times, I was just wondering if anyone knows what that is? inurl:login.aspx + "register" "retrieve password" + intext:employment
Reporting & Analytics | | Rubix0 -
What's the final word on Image Search tracking in Google Analytics?
Sorry if this has been answered but I can't seem to get a straight answer to my questions by searching around. How is traffic referred by Google Images counted in Google Analytics? I know it used to be referral traffic from google.com/imgres. A lot of things I have read say that it should all be under google/organic now, but my site still gets referral traffic from google.com/imgres, so that can't be. However I also get traffic as google/organic that I am pretty sure is from image search, because we don't rank for the keyword normally, but we do for image search. What's the deal? How is traffic from an embedded image in a regular result page counted? How can I segment my image search traffic better? It would be great to see image search traffic as it's own medium. I found a script here -- http://jrom.net/google-images-in-google-analytics -- that looks promising, has anyone used it or can recommend another way? I haven't used the GA API very much so I want to make sure the script is kosher and won't screw up my numbers.
Reporting & Analytics | | tact0 -
Adwords Clicks correlating to Analytics Paid Visits
Would appreciate if anyone could clarify for me the correlation between 'clicks' in Google Adwords and visits for paid search in Google Analytics. Currently i see several thousand clicks a day in Adwords, yet our analytics account will only report a few hundred visits so i do not know which data set to use as the most reliable source for analysis. e.g 16th May. Analytics > TrafficSources > Sources > Search > Paid = 208 visits Adwords > All Campaigns, Total Clicks = 1153 i have found a few other questions asking the same thing here and here but dont feel they answer my question. We know our Adwords account is linked to our Analytics account as we got in touch with our PPC account manager originally about this and on reiew they found an error in our setup. Since then we know this is working as search terms and source are showing up and we have auto tagging enabled. Thanks, Tom.
Reporting & Analytics | | Sarbs0 -
Tracking clicks from a specific link
Hi all, I'm looking for a bit of help with Analytics. I want to track the number of clicks that my main CTA generates over the course of the month. I've got all my goals set up correctly, but is there some sort of code that I can add to that specific link which will count the goal conversions which it generates? Do I need to set up something specific in GA? Thanks a lot for your help,
Reporting & Analytics | | theshortstack0 -
GA - how returning visitors are counted ?
If a visitor comes to my site from 3 different traffic sources within a session, does GA report shows 1 visit and 2 returning visitors ? Previously ( before Google made changes in session ) it used to show 1 visit and zero returning visitors. right ?
Reporting & Analytics | | seoug_20050