You may notice that one or more of your keywords displays a higher number of conversions than it has clicks. For example, a keyword may have 10 conversions but only 2 clicks.
What Causes The Issue?
There are a number of different reasons that a keyword may display more conversion than clicks. We’ll look at a few of these now.
Many-Per-Click Conversions
Some revenue tracking systems allow users to track multiple conversions per click, as this is sometimes a valid scenario.
For example, you may want to track a particular action that a user could take multiple times from the same initial click (like playing a song).
Reporting Date Of Conversions
Depending on your revenue tracking system, your conversions may be recording on the Date of Conversion (DOC) rather than the Date of Click (DOCL).
For example, imagine that two users clicked on an ad on 1/1/2023, and both converted on 1/2/2023. Another user clicked on an ad on 1/2/2023, but converted the same day. If you’re tracking on the DOC, the clicks for 1/2/2023 would be 1, but the conversion count would be 3.
Saved URL
Imagine that a user clicks on a paid ad, then saves the link or emails it to someone else. This link is then used at a later date, during which time the user converts. The publisher will not count this as a click, but it will count as a conversion.
This is because Marin's click metric is derived from the publisher. When a user saves a URL from a previous click and clicks on it at a later date, this bypasses the publisher ad serving, so the publisher will not register this as a click. Because it's not counted as a click in the publisher, it will in turn not be reflected as a click in Marin.
We can still capture the click action by the tracking pixel and can track the conversion via the URL tracking parameters, however, the publisher click has been bypassed, making it possible for a keyword to show more clicks than conversions.
Click Fraud
Google and Microsoft will adjust both the impression and click count if they suspect click fraud has occurred. For example, if the publisher falsely detects click fraud and removes the relevant clicks, the conversion will still appear.
Google Serving URLs With Tracking Parameters For Organic Search
Google may be serving URLs with tracking parameters appended for some organic searches. If the entry URL contains a valid tracking parameter and we're able to find a match within our system, we will attribute these conversions to keywords and ads in the platform. However, since they're organic, there are no paid clicks associated via the publisher.
Our Customer Support team can verify this by checking the raw Tracker data and seeing if the referring URL contains url= instead of adurl=. Please file a help ticket so we can investigate if you believe this is occurring.
To fix this, reach out to your internal SEO team to ensure Google does not crawl any URLs that contain tracking parameters.
Keyword Tracking Parameters Are Not Unique
If your keyword tracking IDs are somehow duplicated (for example, you copy keywords from another campaign), you could accidentally create duplicate tracking IDs. This would then cause a mismatch in conversion/click ratios if the older keyword receives differing amounts of these.
To fix this issue, you can add X or similar to the end of each tracking ID within the 'mkwid=[value]' string to make it unique. It would then read mkwid=[value]X.
