Advertisers often notice two kinds of differences between the data in their Google Ads accounts and those in their web server logs or third-party tracking software. One type occurs when your Google Ads statistics show more overall clicks than your logs or tracking software report. The other occurs when your Google Ads account shows fewer overall clicks.
While these discrepancies may be significant and at times surprising, they don't necessarily mean that there was some sort of invalid activity with your ads. We'll look at some common reasons for these discrepancies and offer tips to help you accurately track your clicks. Google doesn’t analyse or validate third-party data as part of invalid traffic investigations. Learn more About invalid traffic.
On this page
- Reasons why your Google Ads account may show more overall clicks
- Reasons why your Google Ads account may show fewer overall clicks
- Increase your tracking accuracy with Google Analytics
Reasons why your Google Ads account may show more overall clicks
We've found that most discrepancies between your Google Ads statistics and your web logs or third-party tracking software occur because third-party tracking methods are unable to detect all the clicks that your ads receive. There are several reasons for this:
- Repeat clicks: Customers may click your ad several times when, for instance, comparison shopping or conducting research. Your third-party tracking software may not count these repeat visits to your site. As long as the click patterns don't fit a profile of abuse or invalid activity, however, they'll be counted in your Google Ads account statistics.
- Google Network statistics: Google displays ads on a growing network of search and content sites and products. Typically, web tracking software isn't able to recognise clicks from Google Network sites as being affiliated with Google. These clicks are generally labelled only with the third-party site name.
- Browser limitations: There are limitations to your third-party tracking software's ability to track website visits with referrer headers. Most of the newer Internet browsers automatically pass along a referrer header when a customer clicks your ad and is brought to your site. However, some customers deactivate this feature in their browsers. Also, some proxies and corporate firewalls strip out the referrer headers.
- JavaScript not enabled: If your third-party tracking software uses cookies to record referrer headers, ad clicks that occur in a browser without JavaScript enabled won't be tracked. Your Google Ads account, on the other hand, will record clicks that occur in browsers with or without JavaScript enabled.
- Redirects: You can include redirects within your final URL as long as the redirect shares a domain with your display URL. Manage your third-party tracking in URL options.
Reasons why your Google Ads account may show fewer overall clicks
Occasionally your Google Ads account may show fewer clicks than your web logs. Here are some explanations for this mismatch:
- Filtered clicks: Google's click protection technology may have automatically filtered out clicks that we determined to be invalid and prevented them from being charged to your account. You can view data on the invalid clicks that are automatically filtered from your account or specific campaigns.
- Repeat visits: A customer might, after clicking on your ad, visit another link within your website and then click the browser's back button. They might also bookmark the landing page and later return to your website directly through this bookmark. In both cases, the landing page will be reloaded and the third-party tracking software might count those as additional clicks.
Increase your tracking accuracy with Google Analytics
To accurately track traffic to your ads, we recommend using Google Analytics, a free, comprehensive tracking tool. Advertisers who create a Google Analytics account automatically enable a useful feature called "auto-tagging". Auto-tagging appends a unique identifier to an ad's Final URL each time it's clicked, which makes it much easier to distinguish real ad clicks from misleading behaviours such as page reloads. Google charges at most once for each unique tag (if we determine that the click is valid).
