I think we have to be careful of the terms used. Google doesn't report "hits". It reports visits, visitors and pageviews. In order to compare any of them to what bedandbreakfast.com is reporting you have to understand what is being tracked on both sides (bedandbreakfast.com and yours)
If someone is on bb.com and clicking back and forth between their options (as I end up doing when researching a place to stay..then showing DW after narrowing it down) I might end up clicking on their link to your site 3 times in the same internet session (20-30 minute span of time)
With that happening, bb.com is going to report 3 click-throughs because they track every single time the button gets clicked. Analytics is most likely going to report that as 3 pageviews, 1 unique pageview, 1 visit and 1 visitor.
Here is the technical explanation of each of the t
erms from Google.
So in general if you compare bb.com clickthroughs to Analytic visits, the numbers are going to be quite different. If you compare bb.com clickthroughs to Analytic Pageviews the numbers should be pretty close. There will still be some error because:
- some people habitually double-click a link instead of single clicking it, so their counter may record two clicks when your site would only register one pageview
- some may stop the loading of your page (for whatever reason) before the analytics script loads and runs. in most cases if you follow google's setup suggestions, the analytics code is the last part of a page to load... so if someone stops the loading of your home page before it is complete, then clicks on one of your links to see another one of your pages, that referal would not get recorded by analytics.
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