According to analytics, there were only 730 visits on the page. According to AdWords, there were about 1200 clicks on the ad.
How can I track what is going on? Shouldn't I have the same number of visits and clicks?
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Sadly the nature of the beast is that they are never going to line up exactly the adword tracking looks to be server side, where as the google analytics you have on your site is reliant on people's browsers and javascript. But is is not all hopeless
- people with javascript / google analytics disabled will show in adwords but not ga
- if your site is running slow GA may not be called, make sure it is in the head of your page for increased accuracy
- make sure you have the current version of GA code and not the old slow stuff
- what are you using to monitor site uptime? unless you are paying at least a few hundred a month for hosting you are unlikely to get 100% uptime all year, it is possible that clicks on your ads resulted in people getting an error page / blank screen
- make sure your site is fast; people may have got bored and left before GA has a chance to run, use google page speed insights as a starting point and webpagetest for more advanced help
- use the GA debugger for chrome to make sure GA is firing correctly and is on every page
- Just to confirm are you comparing clicks to visits or visitors? If I clicked on your ad twice - not that I would ;) - I would count as 2 clicks, 1 visitor but might be either 1 or 2 visits depending on how far apart I did it. I have seen a lot of people get tripped up by that.
If you are content you have done all of that, I would lodge a complaint with Google; I suspect there are bots that harvest contact info from adwords customers to try and sell SEO to; I have had a lot of phone calls that make me suspicious.
