I received a voucher from LinkedIn which gives me $50 worth of Advertising, and as I've started out on my own as a web designer/developer I thought this would be a good opportunity to get some extra business.Anyway, I've used LinkedIn's stat counter and it has said I've had ten valid clicks to my website. However, when I check my Google Analytics account, it states that one day I only received 6 clicks from LinkedIn, 4 of which had a 100% bounce rate and stayed on the website for 00:00:00. I've spoken to LinkedIn about it, and they e-mailed me back saying a few things. They have said some users might have Javascript turned off, so won't show up on my Analytics software. He also said that my Analytics software might be tracking LinkedIn.com (which it is) and that this will over/under report registered clicks on my site.To me, I'm suspicious that most of the clicks aren't 100% legit, and they might be trying to eat up my $50 voucher before I have to start paying. It does sound like a paranoid view point, but when one stat counter is saying I've had 10 clicks in a day, and my Google Analytics account is telling me only 6 clicks came from there.Am I right to be paranoid or have I completely missed how these things work?Cheers
LinkedIn Advert stats not matching with my Google Analytics data
google analytics;click tracking;linkedin
There's a difference between PPC clicks and the website visits reported in Google Analytics. A click gets logged as soon as LinkedIn redirects the user to your site. However, your page needs to load in the ga.js code from Google's servers and then send an image request back before the visit is recorded. This process sometimes doesn't complete. Here's a few reasons:The user leaves your site before the code is downloaded and runThe user clicks on a link deeper into your site before it's runOther technical issues like the code just failing to download or people deliberately blocking itThe issue that your reporting is normal and happens with all PPC ad providers such as Google AdWords. However, 40% seems a quite high failure rate. Possible reasons include:Sometimes the HTTP referrer used to show where a visit is coming from get's blocked or lost before it's picked up by GAYour GA tracking code might not being installed properlyIt could even be that 10 clicks isn't really enough to make judgments about as the results you have so far might not be statistically validMy advice would be to try out using the GA URL tracking parameters (utm_source, utm_content etc) instead or relying on the referrer. It's the way Google advises tracking PPC campaigns anyway and has the added benefit that you can check your server logs to validate what you seen in the LinkedIn reports.