Several months after I took over our company’s Adwords account, I began tracking the sales via Analytics and an Excel spreadsheet. I used the information to calculate my weekly commission - based off of the campaign’s past week’s ROI. I noticed that the conversions shown in Adwords did not match up with the conversions shown in Analytics. So I contacted Google.

10+ emails and about 3 weeks later, I learned that Adwords records campaign conversions for sales that were made within 30 days of an ad click regardless of whether or not the user closed their browser window, but Analytics records a campaign conversions for sales which are made within 30 days unless that person closes their browser and does not return before 30 minutes - at which point their session is cleared. So if the person clicks an ad, leaves the site for a day, and comes back and makes a purchase, then the conversion is recorded in Adwords, but not in Analytics. This also brings to light the fact that if you record the total number of conversions for each day of one week, and then you check the total number conversions for that week say, 1 month later, you will get different amounts. Google updates past conversions in Adwords which were made up to 1 month after the sale.

This still doesn’t make sense to me, and nobody at Google could explain why Adwords and Analytics data doesn’t match up. This being said, I have come across a different problem which goes against this previous explanation - again, one which Google has been unable to clarify for me. We had one campaign, when I assumed control of the website, which was made up of combinations of words which someone might type in, in order to find our site. Combinations of the words which make up our company’s name. I promptly deleted this campaign, since our company’s website came up number 1 organically anyways. Also the revenue generated from those keywords was messing up my conversion numbers. Anyways, 6 months later, I am still seeing conversions in my Analytics account for this campaign - which was deleted 6 months ago.

Apparently, Analytics is storing their sessions longer than 30 minutes as Google would have me believe. If anyone can explain this to me I would be very appreciative.