Category — Discrepancies

To account for the inevitable disrepancies between reports by my main analytics program and Google AdWords (and the other sponsored searches), I’ve done a lot of research including hit-by-hit comparisons. Here is my current list of reasons for discrepancies.

If you keep up with web analytics news, you may or may not know about the recent fuss over the behavior of a free, widely-used virus-protection program from the company AVG.

If you have a PPC (pay-per-click) search effort happening, you may be allowing the PPC engines to loosely match your paid-for terms with various terms typed in by human searchers.

To keep abreast of what’s being matched to what (and maybe identify inappropriate matches that can be avoided by adding negative search terms, or get ideas for cheaper exact-match terms), try this report.

There are unwritten rules about how dimensions can be combined in 2-D reports. The rules have to do with the incredibly important distinctions between hit dimensions and visit dimensions.