Google Ad Word Counts

[birstein]

I've just checked Google Adwords reports for June for a client. The clicks she is paying for are about 90% more than the keyword clicks my Urchin "keyword" report is reporting for June. For instance, Google claims that she received 212 clicks for the keyword "California spas" in June but Urchin only reported 10 instances of the keyword "California spas" being used. Either Urchin is very inaccurate or Google is not reporting actual clicks, which is what they claim.

Any ideas about how to actually verify Google AdWord click counts? Is there a log analyzer program that analyzes keywords accurately that I should buy?

Thanks for any suggestions. . .

I suppose I could download the logs for the last two weeks and search through them manually but that would take forever!

[rocos]

You can build a special page for adwords, so you can analyze you log file to get your ROI.

[birstein]

Where? In Adwords? Or using some Log Analyzing software? I'd appreciate it if you could be more specific. Google claims that we are paying PER CLICK, therefore I expect to find a line in my server logfile that indicates the keyword in an HTTP request each time I'm charged by Google. Correct?

[SoftStrat]

Where do you have your links pointed to in your google ads? Your home page? Other pages within your web site? Both? Is Urchin collecting the data on the same pages that you have your Google ads pointing to? With our analytic tool (we don't use log files to track your traffic), we actaully put a piece of javascript on each of your web site's pages that will collect the data from the incoming Google url.

To do this: we set up a tracking string at the end of your Google destination URLs that point to your web site. Then we set up that same tracking string within our tool, so that when somebody clicks on your google ad, we'll be able to pick up all of the info.

But if you had a google url pointing to a page on your site that didn't have our code on it, we wouldn't be able to pick up the referring keyword.

Did this help or did I confuse you?