Why Are My Adwords & Analytics Stats Different?

A common question that every PPC marketer asks at some point is: "Why are my Adwords & Analytics stats different?".

The key area of difference is between goal conversions reporting in Analytics and conversions reported in Adwords. The answer lies in one key statement:

Adwords Uses ‘First Click Wins’, Analytics Uses ‘Last Click Wins’

What does that mean? Well – let’s take the following example:

Annie is searching for dog food online. She types in ‘dog food’ and clicks on the Google Ad of www.crazydogfood.com. She has a look around the site but isn’t sure which one to buy so she leaves the site and takes her dog, Bonzo, for a walk.

Later that day, Annie decided which dog food to get so she turns her computer on and remembers the site she went to before – www.crazydogfood.com. She types the URL into the address bar and hits return. Thereafter she purchases Bonzo some new dog food and leaves.

Now here’s where it gets interesting:

In crazydogfood.com’s Adwords account, 1 conversion has just been logged.

In crazydogfood.com’s Google Analytics account, 1 goal conversion has been logged… but not for Adwords. Instead, Google Analytics has attributed this goal conversion to a direct visit.

Furthermore, the revenue data collected by the Google Analytics E-Commerce code has also attributed this revenue to a direct visit.

And it gets worse…

The Director of crazydogfood.com decided that PPC marketing wasn’t working, because he only looks at Google Analytics, which was reporting half as many conversions as Google Adwords and half as much revenue as what was really made from his PPC investment.

Why Are The Stats Different?

Google Analytics uses a ‘last click wins’ tracking methodology. This means that Analytics attributes a visitor’s source as coming from the most recent source used to access the site. In this case, the source was ‘Direct’, as the user came from a direct visit.

Google Adwords, however, remembers all visitors for 30 days. Anyone who clicks on an Adwords ad has their click logged there and then. Any conversions that occur within 30 days will be logged on the day that user first clicked. This means your past Adwords data can change up to 30 days later!