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Google Analytics - How can it be? (10)

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Hey

I added analytics to one of my pages - When looking at the stats and comparing to MGID in this case, I have couple of issues:
1. The number of visits that I see in Voluum (which are coming from mgid) is much higher than what I actually see in GA.
2. How can it be that for some publishers (widget IDs) I see 100% bounce rate and 00:00:00 duration time on page - but still got leads and even a depositing user from one of them?

Thanks

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If your LP has only 1 page then your bounce rate must be 100%, check its definition.

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Thanks osmiumman - yes it's a pre-lander (one page) but I do have lots of 'less than 100%' bounce rates.

The pre-lander has links to the offer LP, yet when clicking on it even that they are moving to the offer LP they are still under the same URL - only when clicking again on the sign up button they leave my domain.

And how do I have sign-ups and even FTDs from ZERO time duration pages? makes sense?

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1. GA will always show way less visits, their methodology is different, they don't count some of the bots ... Voluum counts every hit that goes through it, GA is more complex, loads longer ... thus some users will close the LP before GA fully loads.
2. 100% bounce rate is ok as osmiumman already explained. Are you sure that ALL visits had 0:00 duration? Or just some of them?

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Thanks Matuloo

78% had 0:00 duration

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Ok, thought so, part of it will be bots, it can also be various crawlers that are visiting your sites - but since it's not full 100%, it's not a miracle that you see conversions from that widget, because there is real traffic too, "only" 78% is weird

To be honest, I'm not sure what these 0:00:00 visits are sometimes, cause I see a lot of them in GA too on some of my sites, I would say it's bots so you don't really want to buy from widgets that have massive amounts of such visits.

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If I recall correctly, GA's time-on-site feature is also heavily dependent on people visiting multiple pages, and so tends to be very unreliable for our use cases. It's been a while since I looked into this, but the summary is "don't trust that metric as far as you can throw it".

Here's one summary of the issue: http://help.analyticsedge.com/google...sion-duration/

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Thanks matuloo/caurmen

caurmen I will check the link thank you

not sure it matters but wanted to add that I started with GA and then removed it and placed GTM - not an expert here so still digging deep into it - moreover, there is a new interface for GTM and all the videos I see are still for the whole one so it makes it a big harder.

One thing I can say is that when I started to analyze the results , I sent MGID a list of lots of widget-IDs with 100% and 0:00 duration - they checked it and I got ~$50 refund back to my account - they said these are indeed bots and that they blocked them completely from the arsenal, not only for me but in general to all.

I wanted to think that this is a good enough tool to use but according to you now caurmen I should not really trust it. Any other tool you would recommend?

I am considering Cloaking - like fraud buster OR Traffic Armor, but mainly for fraud traffic/clicks filtering. Ideally I thought GTM will be enough though.

I am

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You can mostly trust GA, but it depends what you are using. Some things like time-on-page break in a non-standard use case (and to them, an affiliate is definitely a non-standard use case).

If you want to look for bots, I'd recommend starting with the tried-and-true Javascript approach and going from there: https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...n-Any-Campaign

Time-on-page is also relatively simple to monitor with a custom script: since I've heard this request several times now I'll look into writing one in the near future.

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Thanks!

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