New Feature: Paid Traffic

Update: How is Paid Traffic Determined? (from Statcounter Support)

Today we launch a new feature on StatCounter – Paid Traffic. If you use paid advertising services such as Google Adwords or Bing Ads to promote your website, this new stat will give you an overview of the traffic you are receiving from your advertising spend.

paid_screen

Paid clicks (i.e. clicks to your site from pay-per-click advertising) are grouped together by IP address. The IP address which has generated the largest number of paid clicks to your site is placed at the top.

zoom-top-entry

Let’s take a closer look at the available information using the above example.

  • Icons: On the left hand side you will see icons representing the browser, operating system and country of the visitor. In this case, the paid clicks were from a US visitor using the Safari browser and iOS operating system.
  • Paid Clicks and Page Views: In this case there are the same number (108) of paid clicks and page views from the IP Address. This means that each time the visitor clicked an advert for your site, they arrived at your site but then did not explore any further pages. This could be an indication of a poor landing page i.e. the initial page your visitor saw did not attract them to visit any further pages of your site.
  • Visit Time: For visitors who have explored further than the initial landing page, this column will show the average visit time over all of their paid visits to your site.

Detailed View

Clicking on the plus icon: plus-icon gives you a detailed breakdown of each click:

5-clicks

This shows that all 5 clicks came from Google, and all 5 were for the exact same search; ‘lock smith’. Note that 4 of the paid clicks resulted in only 1 page view each. This may indicate that the user visited your site but then decided to ‘bounce’ and immediately leave your site (rather then exploring more pages) and click on some other Google results instead.

From here, you can continue to drill down on the IP Address by clicking on the magnifier icon: mag where you can get a more detailed view on the exact timestamps of each hit as well as the other pages the visitor navigated to on your site.

Click Fraud

StatCounter is often used to identify instances of Click Fraud. We hope that the new Paid Traffic stat will make click fraud detection even easier for our members. For example, high numbers of paid clicks from a single IP address could indicate click fraud, especially if the visitor only ever visits the initial landing page of your site.

NOTE: Click Fraud occurs when individuals or automated computers click on a PPC ad without having any interest in the product/service advertised. Click Fraud is performed, instead, simply to generate a cost for the advertiser (without any chance of making a sale) and consume the advertiser’s budget.

Conclusion

We hope that this new stat gives our members a quick and easy way to review the return they are getting for their spend on Google Adwords and Bing Ads.

Please let us know your thoughts on this new feature. How are you using this stat? Can we improve it? What other ad networks would you like us to include? Any other questions or comments? Please post below.

Comments are closed.

Try Statcounter free for 30 days

No credit card required. Downgrade to the free plan anytime.

Try it for FREE!