Dan London from the AdWords Editor noticed some interesting figures in his Google Adwords and Google Analytics account. Click fraud stories is not a new thing for anyone. But Dan London made an attempt to explain the reasons behind the huge difference between the traffic and click numbers tracked from within Google AdWords and also by Google Analytics.

And this discrepancy is not that small to be avoided. For a same campaign, Google AdWords and Google Analytics are showing different data. While Google AdWords account tracked and billed for 97,000 clicks in one day, Google Analytics for that same campaign only showed 34,000 clicks.

Google explained it like: “Google AdWords tracks clicks, while Google Analytics tracks visits. If a user clicks on your ad twice within thirty minutes without closing the browser, this will be registered by Analytics as one visit to your site, even if the user left your site and then returned shortly after.”

The points highlighted by Dan London are quite interesting. In his report, he puts a question mark on the geo location importance on clicks. For his campaign, Dan London noticed that most of the clicks were coming from Indonesia and Philippines. He got the data from Friendster.com. He was not able to understand the reason behind the ads being served to Asia, while the clicks were tracked from a US-Asia site.

There can be one reason behind this issue. Friendster, the US based top social network of Pacific Asia, is in English and the official languages of the Philippines is English. Still, Dan London is not able to understand why a major company like Friendster would be performing such questionable clicks.

Google AdWords and Google Analytics should work together to avoid conflicting reports.

Read the full report on AdWords Editor.

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