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MASSIVE discrepancy between GSC and Google Analytics
Hi,
I have a small website that I’m struggling to find accurate traffic numbers for.
Over the last 6 months, Google Analytics says that I’ve received over 1700 visitors to my site through Organic Search. Over the same time period, GSC says I’ve received only 66 clicks through Web Search, and 166 clicks through Image Search.
I tend to think Google Analytics is closer to being correct, because the site has made a bit of money over that time. It’s an Amazon Affiliate site, and over the 6 month time period 380 Amazon items have been ordered through my links.
Google Analytics records about 1500 affiliate link clicks over that timeframe, which matches up pretty well with the 380 items that were bought. It’s also pretty close to the number of clicks recorded by Amazon. I think it’s extremely unlikely that I could have sold that many items and gotten that many clicks if I really only had about 230 visitors like GSC suggests.
As a side note, Ahrefs also has my traffic for that site at extremely low levels. They suggest that I should be getting about 1 click per day, in line with the GSC numbers.
Does anyone have any ideas on why GSC and Ahrefs are showing such a low number of clicks as compared to Google Analytics? I’d like to do some analysis of where my traffic is coming from, but if I can’t trust GSC then it’s impossible.
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3 Replies
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Are you sure you had 1700 visitors and it wasn’t 1700 impressions? Impressions and visitors are different
In any case I’d trust your analytics – it records actual traffic to your site as it happens.
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Normally id trust GSC over GA, possible you set up the non-www domain or something?
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GSC counts your clicks on the search side.
GA counts your visitors, clicks etc on your website’s side. Even if they came from Bing, Yahoo or Baidu.
Former won’t count any traffic that is not from Google. Latter will count everything, sometimes incorrectly.
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