There is an important distinction between clicks (such as in your AdWords Campaigns report) and visits (in your Search Engines and Visitors reports). The clicks tab in your AdWords Campaigns report indicates how many times your advertisements were clicked by visitors, while visits indicates the number of unique sessions initiated by your visitors. There are several reasons why these two numbers may not match:
- If a visitor clicks on your ad and then gets redirected to another page, the auto-tagged parameter gets removed from the URL. Auto-tagging automatically adds a parameter to the end of each of your AdWords destination URLs in order to identify visitors as AdWords referrals. We suggest contacting your webmaster to append the gclid parameter to the redirected URL. If this isn't possible, you may want to consider removing the use of a redirect altogether.
- A visitor may click your ad multiple times. When one person clicks on one advertisement multiple times in the same session, AdWords will record multiple clicks while Analytics recognizes the separate pageviews as one visit. This is a common behavior among visitors engaging in comparison shopping.
- A visitor may click on your advertisement, but prevent the page from fully loading by navigating to another page or by pressing their browser's Stop button. In this case, the Analytics tracking code is unable to execute and send tracking data to the Google servers. However, AdWords will still register a click.
- While Google AdWords automatically filters invalid clicks from your reports, Analytics reports the resulting visits to your website.
