We have a website that we advertise via Facebook, but in Google Analytics only 30-50% of the clicks appear. (The page is not really public yet, so I cannot post a link here)
We already did several test runs and tried different optimizations. Unfortunately none of the optimization resulted in a massive change. (Optimizations like improving page load time, in particular loaded JS like jQuery assets via CDN, etc...)
Right now we have several hypotheses why this happens:
- the page is hosted in Virginia, however the site is for Brazil, so latency might be too high
- in general it takes too long until the page appears, so people might close the page before it's fully loaded
- it's a one-page app, so it might be slow on old computers
- too much AJAX, in particular we use Facebook Connect
- people might use adblockers
We ruled out that Facebook gives us the wrong number of clicks, we already take the number of actual website clicks.
Benchmark results from webpagetest.org
using São Paolo/Chrome/Cable:
- Load time (First View: 3.9s-6.7s; Repeat View 1.9s-2.8s)
- First Byte (First View: 0.5s-1.6s; Repeat View 1s-2s)
- Start Render (First View: 2.3s-5.4s; Repeat View 1.4s-2.2s)
- Document Complete (First View: 3.9s-6.7s; Repeat View 2s-2.8s)
- Fully Complete (First View: 5s-8s; Repeat View 2.9s - 3.6s)
(Yesterday we changed the hosting provider, but I think the numbers before should have been similar.)
What could be the problem? To us it is very mysterious, we would assume that the click counts from Facebook would differ from Analytics' numbers by less than 5%. Seeing more than 50% of the users not reaching our website, makes us believe there is a single big problem that we are not aware of yet.