In running an ad campaign through a DSP, we get clicks and CTR as a measure of performance, from the ads  to the landing page or advertiser website. How do these clicks that our DSP reports, correlate to the amount of users/sessions/visits that the advertiser sees in their Google analytics platform for their website? and why are there usually large discrepancies?
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After a month of ads with Google Ads Shopping campaigns and continuously identifying, day after day, a significant discrepancy of clicks on Google Ads and Sessions in Google Analytics (as well as another analytics tool that brings numbers very close to analytics's numbers), I contacted Google Support. For more than 3 weeks, after numerous interactions and different/contradictory suggestions/explanations/solutions, it finally seems that my case has taken a direction towards the solution, but the result that has been passed to me, despite having convinced me that it is the which may actually be the cause of the problem, was not satisfactory to me. I was really disappointed with the procedure Google Support provided me, and would like more explanations and information from the community.  What I got last through Google's support was this:     "There are two methods for logging out of a session: a session can be   opened on the same day or on several days, weeks or months. Expiration   by time: After 30 minutes of inactivity At midnight Campaign Change:   If a user enters through a campaign, he leaves and then comes back   through another campaign. Why is there a discrepancy between clicks   and sessions? I have separated this  from the help center that   explains specifically what we said in connection If you've noticed one   of the following discrepancies between clicks and sessions, use the    to identify and resolve issues.   As well as reporting the discrepancy between clicks and sessions up to   20% is considerable. "   Among the Google help links passed by the support, it has not been clear to me whether a 20% less discrepancy in the number of sessions in relation to clicks is normal or if only when the session number is higher (the phrase "A single user can open multiple sessions" suggests that it is only normal when the number of sessions is higher).  But if it's really normal that the number of sessions is 20% less than the number of clicks, I'm led to think of the possibilities:  1 - Analytics fails as a tool to count 100% the number of sessions (accessed by the same person or by different people). Once when a click occurs, the user is taken to the site and must count as a session. If it is normal for analytics to compute 20% fewer sessions than clicks, soon the analytics fail to compute all the sessions.  2 - Google uses this explanation to be able to charge up to 20% more clicks than clicks that actually occurred from its users.  I do not like to believe in either hypothesis, first to rely on Google Analytics as a tool to identify sessions and because their numbers are very similar to that of a third analysis tool used (built by my ecommerce platform), and also for not believing that a company like Google would lend itself to deliberately charging 20% ​​more clicks from its customers. So I turn to the community so maybe someone will bring me a third alternative that I have not been able to identify and/or a totally different explanation from the one I received from the support (as they have done so many times over the course of those weeks).
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Considering I have a website and I have millions of direct views (entering directly by URL,  not by any other URL) and that there is no links to this site anywhere else (or that this views don't generate any external link to the site), will these visits increase my positioning in search engines such as Google?  Are search engines capable of measuring direct visits rather than links from other pages?
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This is the views section of the site analytics visible to 25k users on one of my sites:    That's, uh, not correct.  Our site has had its usual activity level during this time.  I checked a couple other sites, and the pattern is consistent.  This looks like a problem in the analytics data that's coming in; did Google change their API?  Update: Same site a week later; note that in addition to the brief spike of accuracy, page views have dropped to (near-)zero for the whole period, unlike the earlier report.  (I know this question has been closed as a dupe, but I thought having the two screen shots together might help somebody.)
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With left nav, responsive design, and various new-user notices, this is what an anonymous user currently sees (browser window here is 1090px wide):    I realize that a lot of this content -- code of conduct, new-user intro, cookies notice -- is important.  And I get that the left nav is an important design element, and responsive design dictates the width of the right column.  But when you add it all up, Q&amp;A -- what the site is about -- gets a distressingly small portion of the screen.  Can we do better?   Maybe we can make that intro/mini-tour shorter? Maybe we can hide the right column for anonymous users? Maybe some things can wait until the user's viewed a few pages? Maybe other things I haven't thought of?   My concern is that anonymous users -- people coming from Google, people who were referred to a site by users hoping to recruit them, or others who find their way to us but aren't invested in us -- will turn away before seeing how rich and helpful our sites are.  Which would be a real shame, because our sites are awesome.  First impressions matter.  When I'm asking a rabbi to check out Mi Yodeya or a professional chef to check out Seasoned Advice or my vet to check out Pets (all of these have happened), I want to make a good impression.  I want the person to see more than 2.5 questions; I want to increase the chances the person will see something interesting or say "oh I can answer that!" and dig deeper.  Yes, the other stuff is important, but maybe not now?  Is there a better way to "stage" all this information for people we haven't yet hooked?
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This post is in reference to the following blog post:   To start off, a quick introduction of myself; my name is Jascha Drel, Product Manager for Advertising at Stack Overflow. In this role, I am part of ’s organization.   Our team is continuously making improvements to the ads experience on our sites. One of the changes we’re excited about sharing is the new Report this Ad feature now available on some of our sites. We want to continue to give our communities more native control over their ad experience. We needed a quantifiable way to receive feedback and this feature will allow that.  We enforce strict  on the types of advertisers we work with but cannot fully control what is shown due to how advertising delivery works. However, being able to hear from our users about problematic ads will be a huge benefit as we can address those problems faster and with more accuracy. The Report this Ad feature will allow us to quickly see and investigate ads reported by you which matters to us because we want to hear your thoughts.  Furthermore, this new feature ensures that the members of our communities have a built-in way to report ads they consider problematic when we test any new ad formats/solutions.  We are launching this feature on 5 sites initially (, , , , and ) to get a good understanding of what we can expect in terms of numbers of reports whenever launching this to the entire network. Prior to launching it network-wide, we’ll share general results we’ve seen here.  What happens once an ad is reported?  All reports will be consolidated into a dashboard that the team will look at several times per week to spot irregularities in terms of the total number of reports, report categories, and on an advertising campaign basis. We will not be replying to individual reports, but we will reach out to our advertisers, to share feedback or notify them if the ad being reported does not fit our guidelines. We may also evaluate our policies in response to large numbers of reports not covered by them. Since we don’t have a baseline for the number of ads that are going to be reported using this new feature, we will consider reevaluating the process if the current process doesn’t scale.    We’d like to share an update on the progress of this feature:   We've launched this feature on 5 SE sites (Server Fault, Database Administrators, Arqade, Game Development, and Unix &amp; Linux) initially for logged in users only, and for anonymous users afterward. The report this ad button was shown several million times (of which roughly 65% paid ads and 35% house ads). We showed several dozens of different ad campaigns. So far we have received 0 reports. We've tested the feature several ways, found some minor bugs (which have been/are being fixed), however, in the vast majority of the scenarios the feature works well (we’re happy to be ).   We’re currently graduating this feature and are releasing it network-wide this week. Feel free to comment below if you have any questions/comments.
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Traffic coming form shortened URLs like bit.ly, do they show up in Google Analytics as direct or do they keep their real referrer?  Ex.: if someone types in a bit.ly link it counts as direct, but if someone clicks a bit.ly link from Twitter, it counts as referral traffic from Twitter?
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I have a problem with mouses on my two computers. I will try to describe that issue: When I point some tab in Google Chrome and try to click, it clics a little below... I need to resize Google Chrome window and it works for a while. Second issue is sometimes I can't click on folders on the left corner of desktop. The others folders are OK... Any advices? Regards
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I sent out links (read-only) to a number of people and am curious if there is a way to see whether people are actually going out and viewing that document.   I understand it likely won't have names for everyone/anyone that looks at it, but I'd be interested at least in knowing how many "hits" it got to make sure that at least some of those I sent it too actually looked at it.
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For several years we've had advertising solely on technology-related sites. But many of our sites aren't about technology at all, so we haven't sold ads for them. Traditionally, that hasn't been a hardship since Stack Exchange sites have required only a small investment from the company to set up and keep live.  However, as we've continued to grow, the resources needed to maintain our network have also increased. Thanks entirely to the efforts of the network's communities, we have become an amazing resource on the Internet.  Generating revenue from non-technology sites will enable us to dedicate more resources to meeting your needs so this is good news!     The test has been in effect since May 21, 2019, and our advertising team will be monitoring to see how ads are performing. We don't know how many ads will run on each site, we're testing different solutions. It could be just a few or a bit more. In either case, these ads will be carefully vetted and we'll be keeping watch to continue to provide good content.  If you see any ads that are inappropriate or have any questions about this experiment, please let me know by starting a new question and tagging it with . This is a work in progress and we are expecting a time of learning and refinement as we move forward.  A few things to be aware of:    We've received reports about ads that redirect, and those have been removed.  We've also received reports about ads that are spammy and those too have been removed.   If you wish to report an advertisement, please take a screenshot of the ad and paste the URL (if possible) along with the site where you saw it to a comment or answer.  I'll report it to the ads team and we can track it down to investigate. Some of the network sites will show more ads than others. This is not due to reduced ad privileges (which don't exist right now for the network) but rather to inventory allowances.  This is an experiment that will take us to about the end of the year.  As such, we're learning about what advertiser networks will work for us and which can offer the quality of ads that we desire. I ask for your patience and understanding during this testing period.   Due to an already existing agreement, MathOverflow will not be getting ads and is not a part of this experiment.    Thank you for your help in reporting what you see and for forgiving us of the mess as we do some remodeling!
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Google Chrome doesn't seem to respect my DPI setting in Windows. I run at 150 DPI, but Chrome ignores that, meaning that images and text are teeeeeeny tiny.  I hit:   Ctrl + + Ctrl + +   to zoom in. Unfortunately every new tab, or new window, defaults to the 100% teeny tiny zoom level.  Update: It's also important to note that you cannot click buttons in flash (e.g. YouTube videos), because Chrome mis-handles mouse coordinates. (Fixed 6.0.472.55)  Is it possible for either:   Chrome to respect my Windows dpi setting? Chrome to remember my zoom preference?   Checked version: 4.1.249.1045    Half fixed    While Chome still doesn't honor the Windows DPI setting, it does now remember your zoom level.  Version: 5.0.375.55    Five-Eighths Fixed    While Chrome still doesn't honor the Windows DPI setting, it does now offer a default "page zoom" option:    Unfortunately there is no zoom level that matches my current DPI setting: 136% (131dpi).  Version: 10.0.648.133  Zoom flag  I tried scoducks' suggestion of the new hidden dpi flag. It's truly awful. It seems to cause Chrome to simply re-scale the final rendered Window; causing text to become blurry (rather than sharper):
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When I check Alexa rankings for my site it says that one site is linking to my site.   Is it only showing back links? If it is then why are other website traffic checking tools like Google showing different different back links?
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Anonymous and unregistered users with &lt; 15 reputation (the amount required to earn the upvote privilege) will now see       feedback   on every post in the area that a logged in user would see "add comment":    When the post area is moused over, the area expands to:     Was this post useful to you? [Yes] [No]     once clicked it will say     sending feedback...   and eventually     Thank you for your feedback.   The goal is to offer the 90% of our traffic that is anonymous users a way to provide more meaningful feedback on posts rather than passively incrementing a view counter.  This click data is currently being evaluated to see what we can do with it. Ideas welcome!
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Let's say I have a database of all websites and their corresponding viewers and buyers. I want to rank the websites based on the conversion rate or where we see more conversion.   So example:  website   viewer   buyer abc.com   1000     10 xyz.com   10       2 def.com   200      1   How do I rank the websites so that I know the top websites are the ones which have higher conversion rates.   Conversion is buyer/viewer
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This is a question to experienced people that might help us shed some light on the issue.   We noticed a very strange behavior on our site, in Google Analytics. Some dude from Finland, namely, from Kouvola city is hitting one of our pages - only one page on our site, 'bout a hundred times per day, all with an average bounce rate of 90%+...  This is causing our overall bounce rate to go up by 1 to 3% per day... which is very disturbing.. since we're trying to do our best in order to keep it as low as possible. And obviously having it jumped from ~24% to 27%, just because of that crazy dude is not making us happy at all... We tried implementing a geo-targeted script in order to catch this particular visitor and deliver him a juicy message, and it seemed like it helped in the beginning, it has stopped for a day or two, but now he's back...   The geo-targeted script was also logging all IP addresses for page requests originating from Finland in order to find out more details and (in order to block them on the server level, later).. but thing is, it was all mainly cable or DSL connections with various, but not constantly repeating IPs... we are all wondering what is he up to really ?   I think that this page should be kept updated with ideas on how to combat this and perhaps someone could also shed light on what it might be ? What is the reason for doing this "bounce-rate attack", as I call it?  There was a similar question asked on stackoverflow earlier, with no meaningful answer - here -
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Description:  I found a nice practice on websites to deal with users who take advantage of AdBlock's software -  is an article on it (have a look at the image of the cat).  I think this should be obvious now...  Problem to solve:  I have an ad container on my site and I will place in this container a short note about "whitelist my site", with the following options:   Use normal, formatted/plain text.  Use an image in the background.   If user has AdBlock, the ad won't appear and my hidden text will appear for them.  According to  AdSense support document:     Encouraging clicks      Publishers may not ask others to click their ads or use deceptive   implementation methods to obtain clicks. This includes, but is not   limited to, offering compensation to users for viewing ads or   performing searches, promising to raise money for third parties for   such behaviour or placing images next to individual ads.   In theory what I'm planning is some kind of encouragement for clicking ads.  Question:  Will I be violating Google AdSense's terms if I implement a text only and/or image only "whitelist us" message? Might I have problems with this type of violation?
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One of the "benefits" of earning 200 rep points is that fewer ads are displayed to you. Instead of seeing three zones (Leaderboard Top, Leaderboard Bottom, and Sidebar), you see only one (Sidebar).  Now I put "benefits" in quotes because I personally don't consider less advertising (especially on SO) to be beneficial. Of course, as the "ad guy", I really don't care because the loss of impressions are statistically negligible, but as a member I feel that I'm missing out on something.  We work hand-in-hand with each sponsor to make sure their ads are high quality and relevant, and we won't even talk to companies with a product/service that we know is a poor fit. And now that there's no more AdSense, that's the only thing we see.  There are so many awesome products/services that I've found through relevant ads, most of which solved problems I didn't even realize I had (or were solvable). , for example, has very recently "changed my life". And of course, there's no other way I'd find out about these, because I don't spend a whole lot of time reading reviews, etc.  So long story short... I think the "reduced advertising" thing should be changed to work as follows:      On the User Profile page, there would be a Checkbox that reads "Show Reduced Advertising". The Checkbox remains hidden until the member reaches 200 rep. Upon reaching 200, the box gets automatically checked.   Basically, it would work exactly the way it did before, except you get the option to turn off reduced advertising.  And yes, of course I'm biased. But still, Good ads are are a Good Thing.
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I know questions on the "hot" tab of a site homepage are based on some sort of views/velocity criteria, but does anyone know the actual algorithm used?  Background: I was considering a feature-request about the "hot" tab, but I don't have enough information to speak about it intelligently.