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A big mistake businesses often make is not having a well-defined web optimization strategy, which will lead to wins when it aligns with your business goals.

If you monitor your website’s performance with an Adobe Analytics dashboard, you may notice that the total visits for a prior month sometimes change. What’s going on?

Our mission is to build sustainable analytics solutions for our clients, and a common choice our clients make is which platform is best for web analytics.

If you are a Digital Marketer, chances are you are using social, paid, email, and/or affiliate campaigns to drive click-throughs to your website. While your marketing tool may be showing you a good volume of clicks, it is important to not simply take those numbers at face value. Several factors can inflate click volumes, so before you dedicate your whole budget to an ad platform, it’s important to have an analytics program in place to validate the impact of your campaigns.

Reporting gaps

There can be a large gap between the “clicks” that your ad platform reports and the impact you might see in Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics. Here’s three reasons why that might be:

1. "Clicks" do not equal "Visits"
   Email servers and ad networks usually count the number of “clicks” on a link. This can be very different than the number of visits counted in Adobe or sessions counted in Google.
2. The Click’n’Close
   Ad networks may report clicks from users that never actually reach your site. Users may close their tab or browser before the page load data can be sent to Google or Adobe.
3. Filters
   Your implementation of Adobe or Google Analytics will have filters to block some traffic. Ad networks will have their own set of filters.

Start small and scale up

If you want to know what impact your click through campaign is really having, it is important to not try to do everything at once.

Start with smaller audience

Why should you limit your audience? A bigger audience is going to have a bigger impact on your bottom-line, right? In actuality, broadcasting your content can be costly and ineffective.

Make it an easy transition

You may think it is important to ‘wow’ users on the landing page with a big image or video. However, the best landing pages have few buttons and limited text.

Grow into optimization

A/B optimization is a great way to improve your campaign methodology. A dedicated analyst is needed to ensure proper hypotheses are tied to the right success metrics for a clear conclusion that can then be validated.

Evaluate success

Having a low cost-per-click is nice, but it is not an accurate measure of success. Revenue is a much better metric.

Also, be wary of how Google Analytics defines and counts sessions.
As we all (should) know, a session (or visit) is a group of page views and interactions associated with a single user (on a single web browser) within a certain timeframe, typically the industry standard of 30 minutes.

These are just a couple of examples of Google Analytics methodologies that differ from industry standards, and yet they are not clearly called out in the Google Analytics user interface. So be sure to keep these things in mind and do your due diligence into analytics platform methodologies before undertaking an analysis and presenting your data.