If you run an Adwords campaign, and also use Analytics to monitor usage (if you don’t – you probably should), you may have noticed some odd behavior in your traffic source data which started to occur around the end of March 2009.
For many of the accounts I manage, I noticed that Analytics stopped reporting traffic coming from Adwords PPC, and at the same time, there was a sudden increase in Direct traffic – which suspiciously, seemed to be a very similar volume to the traffic that used to be coming from PPC. It very quickly became obvious that PPC traffic was now being reported as direct – but why?
Apparently Google quietly implemented a change around the 23rd of March which – unless your Adwords and Analytics accounts are setup correctly, will cause this type of a misreporting of the traffic source.
If you experience this problem, you will probably need to change some config settings in your Adwords account in order to see your sites traffic data properly via Analytics. It seems that unless you have the following in place your Analytics data for PPC/direct traffic will be misreported:
- Your Adwords account must be linked to your Analytics account
- Auto-tagging enabled AND
- Cost data enabled
So if your Analytics has started reporting no PPC traffic and a sudden increase in direct traffic from around 23rd or 24th of March – this is likely to be the problem.
The "fix" seems to quite straightforward (see below), however, under some circumstances it may not be possible for you to do – and it is a great shame that is necessary to apply a fix at all.
One of the potential problems of this workaround solution is that in order to apply the fix, it is necessary to have admin access to both Adwords and Analytics – which is often not necessarily the case.
The steps required to fix this issue follow
- Link your Google Analytics account and your Adwords account
note: in order to do this, the Google account you use for Adwords will need to have admin access to the corresponding Analytics account (and if different people manage different accounts – this could be a problem). - Ensure auto tagging and cost data are enabled (they should be by default).
Once these settings are in place, you should once again start to see PPC data being correctly reported in Analytics – although because Analytics data is delayed, it may take up to 24 hours before the change starts to show in the data.
This strikes me as a potentially huge problem, as at the moment many site owners may be unable to differentiate between Paid and Direct traffic, and I'm concerned that this issue does not appear to have been raised in the mainstream. Does this mean that people just aren’t looking at their Analytics data ?
Here is a Google Support forum thread which discusses the issue and gives an insight into some of the concerns site owners have, but despite quite a bit of searching, I've not managed to find much else on the issue – I'd be very keen for comments or links to other areas where this is discussed.
Post script : I (and presumably many others) received an unusually long and detailed email from the Google Analytics team in February entitled : Action required: Important change to AdWords/Analytics cost data importing which did actually provide a heads up on this issue, and provided instructions on how to resolve it. However the reason why this was necessary, and the implications of it, were not clear. Also the issue of only being able to link a single Adwords account with a single Analytics account was mentioned – but not clearly explained or addressed, and still seems to be a very grey area.
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