Google Analytics reports zero visits but Google Ads shows clicks
I've been working with a client to troubleshoot his Google Analytics setup and discovered a documented issue you should look out for. The Google Adwords campaign summary was reporting over 2000 clickthrus but the Google Analytics AdWords campaign summary showed zero visits for the same period. After some investigation it became clear that the issue manifested itself after the new site was launched. In my mind if a click was occuring but not recording a visit my concern was that the adunit was redirecting to a page that had gone away. I clicked the link in the adunit but it took me to a valid page. Knowing that 301 redirects are used to redirect clients to new permanent homes of content I fired up Fiddler 2 to inspect the actual http request and discovered a 301 redirect. My instinct told me that a 301 redirect wouldn't pass on the campaign data from the original page and was ready to set up my own experiment to test the theory when I came across the definitive answer on the Google Analytics support page "Why do AdWords and Analytics show different figures in my reports?".