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I have a coupon affiliate site that is showing 50-100 click throughs a day on Commission Junction and other affiliate sites. A script built into my site records the number of views of each offer and how many clicks. This is equivalent to what the affiliate programs are recording.

The problem is that Google Analytics is showing only a handful of visits and pageviews a day. No where near what my onsite and affiliate programs are showing.

How could this be? What would cause the difference? What is the problem with Google Analytics?

user1772027
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If outbound clicks are off, it could be an issue with the tracking event not firing before the window is redirected. Cardinal Path did a great study on this here (read the comments as well):

CardinalPath: Experiment: onClick vs onMouseDown Event Tracking in Google Analytics

For outbound links, try adding rel="nofollow" tags to your outgoing links to make sure they don't get clicked by said crawlers.

If pageviews are off between GA and your server, remember that you're crawled by bots that don't run javascript and thus won't send back information back to Google Analytics. In other words, your server might send a page to the googlebot as it indexes (thus incrementing your database pageviews +1), but it won't get sent to GA (thus the server count will always be higher).

Last, make sure your profile filters aren't excluding any relevant traffic: Google Analytics Profile Filters

TomFuertes
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  • I have setup nofollow tags on outgoing links and confirmed that there are no profile filters excluding traffic. I'll let you know what I find out over the next few days. – user1772027 Oct 26 '12 at 21:48