One of the most frequent questions I receive is “Why is the data in my Adwords reporting different than the data in Google Analytics?”

Hopefully I can explain some of the differences.

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Not sure if your Google Analytics is set up correctly? Here is an easy way to check:

Click on this link to install a custom report into your Google Analytics.

Once you have applied it in your account you should see the following tabs at the top of the report:

In general terms you will want to see data in each tab. More specifically:

• Sources. Are you seeing transactions next to your campaigns? If not, check that e-commerce tracking is enabled in Google Analytics and that the monitus code has been properly installed. Next, look for your own domain. You should not see it, but self-referrals from your own domain indicate an implementation issue. Remember that with our service, our code has to be on every page, including mobile subdomains.
• Site Search. If you see terms, that’s great. If not, it could be that the tracking code is missing from the site search results page and/or that Google Analytics has not been configured to track site search terms.
• Event tracking. This is a really cool feature. As part of Monitus tracking, we can automatically send events for Checkout Errors and Checkout Messages. If you don’t see these, please enable them in your Monitus account in Your Account > Tools Settings > Analyze.
• Goals. Goals have to be set up manually in Google Analytics. I recommend setting up a goal for a Sale and a separate goal for “add to cart”. If you don’t see any goals we’d be happy to add them.
• Mobile. I just threw that in because mobile is hot, right? Seriously though, what’s the proportion of mobile traffic your site gets? If it’s significant amount you have to pay attention. If you don’t have a separate mobile site and the conversion rates are much different, start thinking about how you can improve things. If you are using a 3rd party tool or subdomain for mobile traffic you’ll want to make sure that you see some traffic data and conversions. If you see self-referrals check that the mobile subdomain is properly tagged with our code, not the standard Google Analytics code.

We are happy to help if you feel your setup could be better, but please note that some things may require paid consulting time.