Reasons for discrepancies between Adwords and Analytics data

The differences between the data provided between Google Adwords and Analytics can be due to various reasons, theoretically the data of visits, conversions, etc. They should be the same on both platforms, however in practice the most normal thing is to find certain discrepancies.

Either because as a professional the doubt is eating away at your head or that a client is curious about it, below I explain the main possible reasons for these differences:

Different terminology

Adwords tracks "clicks" while Analytics tracks "visits"

User browser preferences

Visitors who access your site through Adwords may have cookies, images or Javascript disabled. In this case, Adwords will count the click but Analytics will not count the visit.

The Google Analytics code needs to be correctly executed for the visits to be counted.

Adwords filter

Adwords automatically filters invalid clicks, in this case the visit will be counted in Google Analytics but not the click on Adwords.

Synchronization between Adwords and Analytics

Google Adwords data is uploaded once a day to Analytics, while Analytics is updated several times a day. So the data may be temporarily out of sync.

Analytics code cannot be found on Landing Page

It sounds silly enough, but if you frequently create new landing pages for your campaigns make sure they all carry the Google Analytics tracking code.

Destination URLs are not tagged

The ideal is to link the Google Adwords and Analytics account to use autotagging, however sometimes this is not possible because the Analytics account is already linked to another account.

In this case, the destination URLs must be tagged, for this we can use the tool URL Builder

Redirects in Landing Pages

Sometimes redirects can cause the Analytics code to not run correctly, in this case the visit is not identified as coming from a paid campaign.

And what other reasons do you know? 😉