Tracking Adwords visits is more complex than you might think

Users of Google's Analytics service can take a number of steps to ensure discrepancies between the figures they receive for AdWords clicks and Google Analytics visits are kept go a minimum.

In a post on the search engine giant's blog, it explained that while it is "not unusual" to see differences in the data, those looking to achieve a high website ranking can make their statistics even more accurate with a little bit of work.

The firm, which claims that its analytics service "makes it easy to turn page views into profits", noted that the skewed results are often down to mistagged campaigns or keywords and the firm urged users to firstly check they have linked to current AdWords and Google Analytics accounts, as well as enabled the auto-tagging feature and ensured cost data is applied to the right profiles.

Once this has been done, it is necessary to look at the reports generated by AdWords to find the keywords and campaigns that are causing the problem, then fix it by checking a number of issues. These include ascertaining that the right tracking code has been implemented, confirming paid visits are not being filtered out of the results that appear in a profile and checking that a "combination of auto-tagging and manual campaign tracking parameters" is not being used.