Discrepancies between TrendMD reporting and Google Analytics reports are normal because of differences in reporting methodologies. That said, both should follow similar trends. The following campaign example indicates some discrepancy between Google Analytics and TrendMD reporting, but the overall trend is similar. Let's explore some of the reasons for those discrepancies:
- Google Analytics site implementation
- A common reason is not implementing Google Analytics properly on all article pages across the site, especially on newly added sections, leading to some of the TrendMD traffic not getting tracked by Google Analytics.
- Partial page load
- Visitors may navigate away from the site before the page is fully loaded and Google Analytics tracking code executes, recording the TrendMD traffic.
- User browser preferences
- Visitors may have set their browser privacy preferences to disable cookies, images, or JavaScript making them non-trackable by Google Analytics. The same goes for users that have installed Google's own opt-out add-on.
- Google Analytics sessions vs. TrendMD clicks
- There is a distinction between Clicks recorded by TrendMD and Visits/Sessions recorded by Google Analytics. While TrendMD records a Click anytime a user clicks a content recommendation on a publisher site, Google Analytics records a single Session/Visit for all user interactions within a given time frame (which expires after 30 minutes of inactivity). For example, if a user reached the marketer's site through TrendMD twice within that time frame, he or she will be recorded as just one Session/Visit.
- Google Analytics sampling preferences
- Unlike TrendMD, Google Analytics data is generally based on a sampling of all visits to the site, rather than the whole incoming traffic. Google Analytics uses sampling in order to generate reports on very large data sets (over 1m visits).
- Time zone differences
- TrendMD reporting is currently still based on US Eastern Time (UTC -5 hours) for all global markets. If Google Analytics is using a different time zone, the daily reporting might have some differences.
- TrendMD UTM tag implementation
- Marketers can get a more accurate view of their TrendMD traffic by implementing a UTM tag for their TrendMD campaigns. They can then see their campaign-specific traffic in Google Analytics under "Campaigns" rather than under the more limited "All traffic sources" (showing traffic from paid.TrendMD.com).
For any questions regarding your campaign data in Google Analytics, feel free to reach out to our support team for further assistance.
