Yellow Pages clicks vs Google visitors

If you are a Yellow Pages online advertiser and your Yellow Pages clicks don't match your Google Analytics statistics of visitors you are not alone.

Our Statistics

For our site over a few months we had a report of 150 clicks from Yellow Pages however Google Analytics shows just over 100 referral visitors from Yellow Pages over the same period. What's happening to the missing 50%?

Well there could be a range of reasons including:

Non arrivers: People did click on a link from Yellow Pages but bailed before your complete web page was loaded (and the analytics code is at the end so it didn't fire). This could arise because your page is taking too long to load or has errors in it.

Double counting: I suspect Yellow reports the total number of clicks whereas Google is looking at visitors. A visitor during one month may click the link twice so be counted twice in one and once in the other.

Other stats include we had 3,500 appearances, a total of 300 clicks (including to review just the online ad). So basically 10% of people that are shown the ad click on the ad or click through to the website link.

There were even a handful of people who showed up in Google Analytics who had searched for us in Google and found the special Yellow Pages entry.