Why are C3 Click Counts different than AdWords or Google Analytics?
C3 compares differently to these: it is apples and oranges.
Your ad server and display clicks are a metric of sell-side clicks. A sell-side click is when a consumer (or non-human bot) clicks on a display ad unit or its destination URL. As soon as the click from human or non-human activity is made on the sell-side, it's defined as a click.
In most third party research measurement systems (C3 Metrics, Coremetrics, Omniture), a click is measured only after the click is made and the visit from the click stays on the page after the page fully loads. Only after the page fully loads, does the click become a click in C3 Metrics and other solutions.
Clicks will generally be lower in C3 Metrics and most third party measurement systems versus sell-side click counts.
Things that often affect Click number differences:
- Consumer hits their back button before page loads fully
- Consumer shuts down their browser before page loads fully
- Page of your website does not fully load fast (note differences in synchronous and asynchronous methodology from your website as well as basic page load speed page by page with different unique elements
- Connection speed of consumer
- How high in the html body of the page the site tag is placed versus other site tags and whether one is in a container tag or placed directly on the page
- And obviously, our C3 site tag has to be on all of your consumer facing pages including your mobile site if you have a mobile site on a separate subdomain. These should be the same pages that your Omniture/Coremetrics/Google Analytics site tags are on (hint compare list of page urls for these and C3 Metrics...they should be exactly the same.
Apart from number 6 above, click counts should be within 10-20%, unless there are severe page load speed issues on certain pages of your site or a high percentage of non-human click activity.
There are some exceptions to this: Google Analytics. Google Analytics does not follow the typical protocol of third party research entities when it comes to clicks from its own properties.
Specifically, it does not wait for the page to fully load per typical third party research protocol. Why would this be?
Your Google Analytics account is automatically connected to your adwords account (which may have display and search and YouTube video being deployed through that adwords account). This is the clue.
When you look in your Google Analytics account and your adwords account, you will discover that the click count from a channel like search matches exactly. Exactly.
None of the six reasons listed above come into play (page load speed, nobody hits the back button, etc) which is unlikely. So what is going on is that Google Analytics dismisses protocol used by C3 Metrics/Omniture/Coremetrics, and takes the click count from your adwords account.
Thus it places sell-side clicks in the count column where consumer-side clicks normally reside. So in this case Google Analytics clicks will differ from C3 because of deviation in consumer-side methodology.