Comments on: Discrepancies In Webmaster Tools Clickthrough Data

By: Tom

Tom — Wed, 05 May 2010 14:07:00 +0000

Hey Greg, sorry for the slowness – I only just saw your post here. Thanks for the link

You’re right that it’s early days here but the data is pretty far out for sites I’m looking at. That said, seems like there might be some uses for this data – I’m planning an updated post at some point highlighting what it IS useful for.

By: Jenn

Jenn — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 20:20:55 +0000

Doesn’t the Google Analytics visits track any visit to your site where the click through data on Google Webmaster Tools would only track the “visits” to your site from the Google search engine result page? This would explain why the GA visit count is higher than the GWT click through count.

By: Jim Rudnick

Jim Rudnick — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 13:25:11 +0000

As noted by others on various blogs, the numbers are “out of whack” with our own analytics, google’s analytics, Urchin and plain jane .NET scripts too. Which to me means, that the app is not yet ready for public webmaster consumption…surprising a bit as this after all is Google!

Jim

By: Dave Bascom

Dave Bascom — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 15:06:47 +0000

GWT data has always been sketchy, so I’d have been very surprised if it were more accurate than it is. I agree with Nelson, however, that it’s a heck of a lot better than nothing and worth looking at to see what you can glean from it. If you don’t find it useful, just keep ignoring it like we do with most of the data in GWT.

Also, don’t hold your breath that it will ever get more accurate or comprehensive than this. I expect it to always be a bit fuzzy like it is now.

By: Jack Plouse

Jack Plouse — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 03:55:38 +0000

I cant say I am 100% confident yet, but Google states in the webmaster tools blog…”Webmaster Tools does some additional data processing—for example, to eliminate duplicates and visits from robots—that may cause your stats to differ from stats listed in other sources.”….could this be a reason for the discrepancy?

By: Nelson

Nelson — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 15:44:26 +0000

Google notes that there will be discrepancies here http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=165517. I’m not sold that the data is perfect yet either, but even if it’s just a sampling, it’s still useful. I hope they make it accurate and comprehensive though.