Conversion confusion, part 2 – The difference between clicks and sessions in Analytics for Google Ads advertising
Magnus Bråth
In the blog series Conversion Chaos, we go through various tracking-related factors that can affect conversion measurement in your Google Ads advertising. The different points we cover can be used as a checklist when troubleshooting or setting up a new Ads account.
In the second part of our series on factors that can disrupt conversion tracking in Ads advertising, we take a closer look at how Ads clicks and Analytics sessions relate to each other, and how this can affect conversion measurement. All examples below are therefore based on a setup where conversions are imported from Analytics into Ads—they apply to both e-commerce tracking and goal tracking.
Conversion rate in Ads vs. Analytics
As you may know, Google Ads and Google Analytics calculate conversion rate differently:
- Conversion rate in Google Ads: conversions / clicks
- Conversion rate in Google Analytics: conversions (goals or transactions) / sessions
This can play a decisive role in certain situations where you see the conversion rate drop in the Google Ads interface, while it remains stable in Google Analytics. In such cases, it may be worth taking a look at the Google Ads report in Google Analytics to see how the number of sessions compares to the number of clicks. Since it is possible for the same user to return and start new sessions without clicking on an Ads ad again, the number of sessions is usually slightly higher than the number of clicks. If you notice that the opposite is true—that the number of clicks is higher than the number of sessions—something may be wrong. This can be due to several factors, but we will focus on the most common causes (plus a bonus!).
301/302 redirects due to poor maintenance of final URLs (or poor communication with the site owner)
In most cases, this type of issue occurs when a visitor, after clicking an ad, is redirected to another page before Analytics has had time to identify the source of the visit (Google Ads, in this case). When this happens, the visitor is categorized as coming from the Direct channel or Google Organic in Analytics, instead of Google Ads. This typically occurs when web pages are redirected in connection with, for example, a site restructure or the addition of an SSL certificate (switching from http:// to https://), without updating the final URL in the Ads ads.
To minimize the risk of this type of problem, it is recommended to regularly check the links in your account to ensure that they land on the correct pages. Don’t forget to also check ad extensions, such as sitelink extensions, when performing this review.
Errors in tracking tag implementation
Errors can also occur with tracking tags, causing Analytics to incorrectly identify the traffic source when a visitor lands on the site. For this type of issue, the solution is more complicated and technical than simply changing the URLs in the ads.
EXTRA BONUS – Gmail ads in Display
As an extra bonus, I would also like to highlight Gmail ads within Display as a cause of discrepancies between clicks and sessions. The reason I label this as a bonus point is that, in this case, it is not a tracking error but rather a result of the ad format itself. Gmail ads differ from Google’s other ad formats in that a click does not immediately take the user to the website; instead, it expands the ad into a larger email-like format. From the expanded ad, the user can then click through to the website, thereby generating a new Analytics session.
