Clicks Vs Visitors : Sounds Fishy.... what goes unreported

As digital marketing professionals this is one of the most biggest unsolved mysteries of digital advertising.

The clicks I buy don't result into visitor on the Analytic side... I am sure you would have thought of this as well even if you have run a small insignificant campaign on the Internet.

Some of the most common answers are like this.

1. Its your analytic tool that is under reporting 
2. Are you tracking the visitors using unique parameters.
3. I dont think you are using a paid tool, the free tool is not very efficient / sufficient. 
4. This is a common problem !!
5. I think you need to check the code, talk to your tech team
6. you should use analytic only as a  indicator and not precise.

Having said that I am now embarking upon a journey to seek out the real truth behind this mystery.

Tools are packed & ready... let us see what searching for this yield on the all seeing eye. "GOOGLE".

and the lightning strikes.

Read this.
http://support.google.com/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=63917

I am not surprised by some of the answers on this. But even after doing all this I have seen advertisers cribbing about the discrepancy of up to 50%.

So my mystery study went on to see what other people think about this.

This is what i found out.

Article one .

http://www.receptional.com/blogs/advertising/click-vs-visits-why-discrepancy

Article two.

An old one this only says that the problem has been in existence for a long time.

http://groups.google.com/a/googleproductforums.com/forum/#!category-topic/adwords/campaign-management/x7UlTKT4tcA

As back as 2007 people were discussing this.

http://www.webmasterworld.com/google_adwords/3397109.htm

On SEOMOZ  a recent discussion.


http://www.seomoz.org/q/google-adwords-clicks-v-s-google-analytics-visits

One more on seomoz.

http://www.seomoz.org/q/can-anyone-explain-why-there-is-a-disparity-in-paid-search-clicks-vs-visits-in-google-analytics-and-other-analytic-platforms

Still no answers.... the mystery deepens... why and why on earth can technology not solve this.

I saw people saying things like.

1. I dont Know 
2. Its a common problem 
3. Maybe this, maybe that.... 

But no body had a concrete solution.

So here is my take on the age old mystery. Do test out and share results. I have done the same for a few campaigns that we mange and the results are quite promising

1. Get your analytic code way up on the html execution order. First line after body tag.<this will eliminate the question of people navigating to other pages before the complete page loads>
2. Get IP address along with date time stamp of each visit on your site. < This will eliminate the issue of multiple clicks per user in a short span of time>
3. Remove All third party scripts from the initial page load.  I don't know if you have noticed on your status bar , if you are using third party ad-servers the amount of time that take to load the banner or some ad unit.<This will eliminate the load time issue>
1. See that all third party scripts are loaded after real content of the page along with the navigation has loaded.By then your analytics scripts should also have fired.
2. Facebook connect, some times can take a lot of time to load
3. twiter feeds and other RSS feeds can also take some time to load
4. Active API's with third party servers can take time to load
5. Load adserving tools after the page is loaded.
4. Always get your server-logs out from the cold storage of the server and run them thru some log report management tool . <Not sure if shared hosting website provide this, but asking wont kill you.> 

The mystery machine is still on this trail, will post update of new adventures and log reports...