confounding reporting discrepancies

[Matt]

For each of my adwords keywords, I've set up a unique tracking URL (regular URL with a tracking code passed as a parameter.

In the last week, I've noticed a huge discrepancy between the number of clicks google is reporting for each tracking URL, and my internal web logs. For instance, for one tracking URL, google is reporting 5 clicks, yet my web logs say that I have over 80 hits on the URL. These URLs are not posted anywhere else, nor are they coming from our internal IPs.

Here's the second part of my data discrepancy, for certain tracking URLs, google is reporting over 2000 clicks, yet my internal web logs show no clicks. I've worked with my engineers to see if everything is configured properly, and even tested clicking on that URL, and everything works fine.

My theory is that google is serving up the wrong tracking URLs, and then reporting that the clicks went to a different URL than the one that was served. This would explain both discrepancies that I describe above.

It seems like this is only applying to content match ads. Here's why I think this is the case: I went to a content match site where our ads appear, and looked at several of the ads. Sure enough, these ads had tracking codes that corresponded with the URLs that were seeing a lot of clicks in our logs, but little reported in google.

Any ideas?

[seomike]

click fraud mostlikey check the ip's are they the same over and over. Google probably caught it or found pattern that was fishy and only charged you for what they thought was real.

[Discovery]

I dont know if this is the root of your problem. However, Google does remove a lot of click activity that they deem "questionable". This activity does not show up in your campaign management system, but of course the clicks will show up in your log files.

I dont know how to explain the reverse. You have 2000 clicks, but your logs suggest only a few clicks? This certainly could be a Google error, or click fraud. Your Google rep should be able to help you figure this out.

Discovery

[Matt]

There was one change I made right before this started happening - not sure if this could have caused the problem.

Before this started, I noticed a lot of traffic going directly to my root url, instead of to my URL with the tracking code appended to it. I did a bit of digging and found out that all of the clicks that went to a tracking-code free URL came via content match. I assumed this was because the URL in my text ad pointed to my URL, even though I specified specific URLs for each keyword in each ad group. Could this have somehow contributed? More specifically, is this expected behavior? My understanding is that if one specifies a URL for each keyword, the ad should always point to that URL, and not the URL in the ad itself.

After I changed the ad text URL to include a tracking code, I started seeing all of this wacky behavior, tons of clicks to the ad text URL (which was different from all the keyword-specific URLs), yet virtually no clicks to that URL in my web logs.

Thanks for your time in looking into this issue. I'm really curious to get to the bottom of this.

Matt

[DarkMatter]

For instance, for one tracking URL, google is reporting 5 clicks, yet my web logs say that I have over 80 hits on the URL. These URLs are not posted anywhere else, nor are they coming from our internal IPs. Any ideas?

did you specify in your robots.txt that these urls not be indexed? could these urls have been indexed and ranked so that some of these visits are coming from organic clicks?