Data Conflicts: Analytics vs Adwords data

Am I the only one who cares about integrity of data? I search the web and I can't seem to find anyone else who cares about the statistical validity of data for decision making of adwords campaigns. Or about reconciling different data from adwords and analytics.

For instance, for the month of August, my google analytics report shows 50 new customers from the Google Adwords campaign. For the same time period, the Adwords internally generated report show 100 (yes, I'm not giving out my real data).

My belief is that Adwords is a cookie-based system so as long as the visitor converts into a customer on the same computer that they first clicked thru from google on, they count as an Adwords customer.

Analytics, I theorize, is session based. So if the customer first came to my site from an Adwords click but then bookmarked the site and closed his browser. Then he came back to my site by either using the bookmark or googling (natural search) my name, he would count in Analytics as either direct or natural search customer respectively.

Right?



del.icio.us