Merchant Support Knowledge Base
The knowledge base is organized into different categories; please select a category to view the solution title. Solutions will appear within the same pane as their titles.
- Billing and Payment (24)
- Product Feed / Listings (57)
- Login/Password (2)
- Click Fraud (4)
- Category Mapping (6)
- User Guides and Forms (11)
- The ROI Tracker (29)
- Surveys, Becoming a Trusted Store (32)
- Store Information (15)
- Adding a Store Phone Number (3)
- Reviews (4)
- Bidding (10)
- Account Activation / Termination (12)
- Policies and Agreements (9)
- Shopping.com Search Results (6)
- Storefront/Datafeed Providers (11)
- Adding a Store Logo (11)
Click Types Explained: External Analytics
There is an important distinction between clicks and visits. If you are using a third party analytics software or website, the clicks or pageviews column in your reports indicates how many times your advertisements were clicked by visitors, while visits indicates the number of unique sessions initiated by your visitors. There are several reasons why these two numbers may not match:
1. A visitor may click your ad multiple times. When one person clicks on one advertisement multiple times in the same session, our tracking software will record multiple clicks or pageviews and an external analytics program will recognize the separate pageviews as one visit.
2. A user may click on an ad, and then later, during a different session, return directly to the site through a bookmark. The referral information from the original visit will be retained in this case, so the one click will result in multiple visits.
3. A visitor may click on your advertisement, but prevent the page from fully loading by navigating to another page or by pressing their browser's Stop button. In this case, the analytics tracking code is unable to execute and send tracking data to the Shopping.com servers. However, if the page started loading before it was halted, our software will still register a click.
4. To ensure more accurate billing, Shopping.com automatically filters invalid clicks from your billing report. For more information, please refer to the solution on “Click Monitoring and Tracking Policy.”
Visits Explained
Most analytic websites and built-in web store system analytics provide detailed information on both visits and visitors in your account and usually a tally of pageviews. Visits represent the number of individual sessions initiated by all the visitors to your site. If a user is inactive on your site for 20 minutes or more, any future activity will be attributed to a new session. Users that leave your site and return within 20 minutes will be counted as part of the original session or visit but you will still incur a charge for the additional pageview. Also, if the same user clicks on multiple items within the same visit within 20 seconds, you will be charged for each click or pageview during the visit. Since Shopping.com only is responsible for referring your site with the click, we do not track page visits for your site.
Pageviews vs. Unique Pageviews
A pageview is defined as a view of a page on your site that is being tracked by Shopping.com analytical tracking code. If a visitor hits reload after reaching the page, this will be counted as an additional pageview. If a user navigates to a different page and then returns to the original page, a second pageview will be recorded as well.
A unique pageview represents the number of sessions during which that page was viewed one or more times. This is the metric Shopping.com uses to bill you for clicks.
-Adapted from Google Analytics, https://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?answer=57164&hl=en_US
Keywords: click types, clicks, pageviews, visits, unique visits, click fraud, click discrepancy, billing
