Click and Impressions Discrepancy

Owned by Vin Turk
May 31, 2017

Anyone running a marketing campaign probably will come across discrepancies between the number of clicks received via ads and the number of visits from their target accounts reported for the exact same ads.

There are a number of reasons for such discrepancies, and this post offers some tips for dealing with them. Our goal is to help you overcome those that can be eliminated, and enable you to live in peace with those that are difficult to solve.

Identify the Scope of the Problem
The first thing you need to do when dealing with discrepancies between clicks and visits is make sure you understand the scope of the problem: Is this a local issue with just one of your programs? How long have these discrepancies been occurring? What were the standard discrepancies for your previous programs?

By identifying the scope of the discrepancies, you and your technical team will be able to concentrate on the most relevant factors. Dealing with an “across-the-board issue” differs from dealing with an issue from a single program or ad.

Start by trying to answer the following questions:

  • When did the discrepancies begin? Did they appear continuously?
  • Does the problem occur only with a specific ad/program?
  • If you are using a marketing product or service that you have used in the past, take a look at the discrepancies you encountered in the past for comparison.

Make Sure Your Program Ads and Landing Pages Are Set Correctly
You do not need to be a programmer or have technical skills to look into most of these issues. More often than not, it will take you only a few seconds to find out if there is a technical problem that is causing the discrepancies.

Click on your ad and take a careful look at your landing page URL. When setting up a program, you have to link your ad to your analytics tool (Google Analytics, for example). Incorrect linking can lead to inaccurate tracking, which in turn leads directly to discrepancies between clicks and visits. This is why your landing page URL must hold information about the ad.

You should see one or more parameters in your tracking URL that describe the specific ad being clicked on. With some analytics tools, this can be a single parameter (the unique ID of the ad), while with others (such as Google Analytics), this can be 3-5 different parameters. Here is an example of a URL which holds program information for Google Analytics: www.mysite.com/?utm_source=MadisonLogic&utm_medium=ABM&utm_campaing=JUNE35

If you have checked the URL and cannot find anything that looks program-related that could be causing the discrepancies, check the following:

  • Did you set the destination URLs correctly when you created the program? Did you add the relevant program tracking information as a parameter? 
  • Do you have an A/B or split test running on your landing page?
  • Is it possible your server is redirecting the user to a different page without the program parameters? To check this, look at the URL destination you specified for the ad and the URL you see in the browser after clicking on the ad. Are they the same? If not, you probably have a server redirection, and you should make sure your tech team passes the parameters during redirection.
  • Make sure none of your ads leads to a 404 page (“page not found”).

Install the “Tag Assistant for Chrome” by Google

Now that you understand the scope of the discrepancies and have checked the URLs, the next step is to ensure your analytics tool is implemented correctly on your landing page. An error here is one of the most common reasons for data discrepancies.

The Tag Assistant by Google can help you ensure this. Just install the Chrome Extension, go to your landing page, and see if there are any tracking issues. If you see a green or blue icon, chances are everything is fine. However, if a red icon appears, there probably is something wrong.

Tracking Code Positioning
Incorrect positioning of your tracking code can cause the analytics tool to miss some page views. Ideally, the code should appear as close to the beginning of the page as possible (preferably in the <head> tag).
Placing the code in the body or at the end of the page will mostly affect heavyweight landing pages, pages with a lot of external JavaScript and CSS files, or pages that take more than a second or two to load. 

Multiple Tracking Tags
In some cases, having more than one tracking code on the same page might cause your analytics tool to miss some of your visitors.

Compare Time Zone Settings
There may be click discrepancies because your website analytics and Madison Logic are reporting on stats for different time zone settings.

Other Potential Discrepancy Elements

  • Multiple clicks by the same user as just one click (such as a number of clicks within a short period of time, or a double click on an ad).
  • Halted browser – If someone clicks on an ad and then immediately stops the browser before the landing page is fully loaded, your publisher will report a click without a visit.
  • Pop-up blocker – Some pop-up blockers work like this: Your landing page pops up in a new window, the user clicks the ad, the window opens up, and then the pop-up blocker immediately closes the window. Here too, the publisher will report a click, while your analytics will show no visits.
  • No tracking – If a user has opted out of being tracked by using an add-on (such as Ghostery or DoNotTrackMe) or an out-of-the-box browser and site support, your analytics tool might miss some of your users. (In some cases, these tools also may block your publisher and then there won’t be a discrepancy, but in most cases, the clicks will be counted while your analytics tool will not collect the data.)

There also are situations where there is a visit that is not initiated by a click. The most common scenario is when your users return to your site via a bookmark. Originally, they clicked on your ad, liked what they saw, and bookmarked it. At this stage, you have 1 click and 1 visit.

Two days later, the same user returns to your site via their bookmark from two days ago. You still have 1 click, but now you have 2 visits for that ad: 1 click and 2 visits. So, keep in mind that returning visitors may generate more visits and page views for the same ad without generating additional clicks.

Filtering: Ad servers have different methods for filtering impressions from spammers, bots, spiders, back-to-back clicks, link analyzers, and other automated or non-representative web traffic.