Search code examples
facebookgoogle-analyticsmeasurement

Facebook Clicks not matching Google Analytics Sessions

I recently set up a Facebook ad campaign to drive website clicks to the home page of my site.

In Facebook I used the Campaign Objective: "website clicks" when creating the campaign, set my various targeting options and optimised for "Link clicks to your website"

I ran 5 ads in the set, each one with a custom landing URL so that I could check behaviour data in Analytics per ad: eg Ad1 directed to www.example.com/home?src=ad1, etc.

The problem I am facing is that Facebook is telling me that my ads have had x number of clicks, but in Google Analytics, when I check the landing pages report and segment out the URL's containing "src=ad" I'm getting a very different value in the sessions column. Facebook is reporting almost double the number of website clicks as what I am getting in the GA landing page sessions report.

I was expecting a slight difference, however, what could be the cause of such a significant difference in values?

Solution

  • It is not too uncommon to see such a discrepancy in Facebook ad clicks vs Google Analytics sessions. A couple reasons for this:

    1. Users can bounce before triggering a page load, particularly for slower-loading pages. I've found this is the most common issue.
    2. Users could click once on an ad, and click again within 30 minutes, registering as only 1 session in Google Analytics (navigating back to Facebook and re-clicking due to slow load, for example).
    3. A filter in Google Analytics may be weeding out some sessions.

    Check out this answer.