Why are my Google Analytics and Google Adwords revenue figures different?

Why two systems reporting the same sales data seem to come out with different figures.

When you install Google Analytics on a website (and you really should you know) if your website is an online shop, when setting up your account you can pass Google Analytics actual sales data which can be integrated into the rich reporting environment that Google Analytics offers you. All well and good.

Then you decide to try some online advertising (again, a damn fine idea) and you opt for the biggest and easiest to use system out there which is Google Adwords. Just like Google Analytics, you are able to include actual sales data and track this back to individual ads.

Then one day you notice that Google Analytics tells you you one ammount in sales for a particular week while Google Adwords tells you a completely different one.

The reasons for this are as follows. Firstly you may not have set the code up correctly. Both Ananlytics and Adwords can track actual values or just a default values for 'sales' so if you are expecting the systems to give you real values, then do a test order on your site and look at the html source code on the 'thank you for your order page'. This page should include the code for both Analytics and Adwords reporting. Looking at the code you should see the actual value of the order in both bits of code.

If your webshop is an off the shelf template driven site you may find that while the analytics code is sending back the full order value to Google, the Adwords code may just be sending back the order subtotal, exclusive of taxes, post and packing. At first this seems like an error, but many marketing professionals prefer to work out their return on investment calculations like this and so many systems that integrate adwords set up the system to run in this manner by default. This seems to be the main reason why people get confused when comparing Google Analytics and Google Adwords reports.

If you want your adwords reports to include Postage and VAT then tell your web developer who should be able to amend the code to ensure the figures you need are being reported through your analysis tools.

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