Google Adwords and Google Analytics display different results

Question

I created a Adwords Campaign about a Month ago. I'm usually a developer, so I'm not too great with eCommerce and marketing. Usually my Boss does this kind of work. He is managing campaigns and the Google Accounts. Now we ran into a Problem.

This was the first Campaign I created so I was a bit unsure. Now Google Analytics and Adwords display different date. As I compared the two, I found that Adwords had about 7% Clicks than the Sessions in Analytics.

I'm aware that a Adwords Click and a session in Analytics are different thing. For example when a User Clicks the Campaign and visits the side, clicks back and reclicks the Campaign, two Clicks are counted, but that in only one session.

My Boss said he couldn't imagine that about 7% of all users are clicking the Campaign ad within a session. Could there be another reason why this occurs? I checked on this Checklist by Google if I made a Mistake, but I didn't find anything. Has anyone experience with this situation?

Answer 1

Are you using IP filtering to filter out people at your company from your Analytics reports? If you are, and you aren't using IP filtering in AdWords to prevent people at your company from seeing your ads, you may be getting clicks on your ads from employees that are being filtered out of your analytics report. This would explain a higher click than session rate as well.

How large is your company? I've worked for a company before where we did, in-fact, have employees (outside of marketing) that would do searches for our company on google to "see where we ranked" and then randomly click on our ads. They didn't realize that those clicks were costing us (and inflating our metrics). When we found out, the marketing team about lost our minds. Luckily we had a fairly large budget, but still, it was maddening.