Google Ads URL Tracking

Google Ads provides a number of ways for you to track your landing page URLs. So many so that a number of people get a little bit confused on them. So in this video, I want to help demystify some of the Google Ads tracking, talk through the tracking templates, custom parameters, and a number of other pieces to help you make sure that you’re tracking performance as best as possible.

I first want to preface this video by saying that I know that utilizing conversion and remarketing, pixels are very important for Google Ads campaigns. But I’m not going to be talking about Pixels in this video specifically. I’m going to assume that you already have those setup. But if you’re interested in learning how to do that, you can check out the video at the top of the screen right now.

Now with that out of the way, I want to start diving into the in-platform adjustments you can make for your tracking in Google Ads. The first piece we need to do is make sure that we have the proper tracking set up, and there are a couple of different ways that we can do this. If you’re familiar with digital marketing at all, you’re probably aware that you can use URL parameters, and there’s also such thing as auto-tagging within a Google Ads campaign.

So let’s hop into the account level settings for the Paid Media Pros Google Ads account, and I’ll start to talk through each of those. To find the account level settings, you just need to come over here on the left, go to Settings, and then choose the account settings down below.

The first thing I want to talk about is auto-tagging. That’s going to be this one right here in the middle, and you can see that our account has already opted into it. It’s a very easy, simple checkbox that you just have to check, and then you’re finished with it. You can see here that that will tag the URL that people click through my Ad.

Now, one misconception about auto-tagging in Google Ads is that it applies all of the UTM parameters that you would need for tracking in Google Analytics. That’s not actually the case. So I’m going to hop into a help article real quick, and I’ll show you what it does instead. I’m going to focus on this first paragraph in the How It Works section.

When you apply auto-tagging to your account, Google will apply a Google Click ID or a Google Click Identifier to the end of your URL so that it will communicate with the Google Analytics Platform. So as you can see here, if your URL is www.example.com with auto-tagging ON, your URL will look like this, once it actually loads, there will be this additional gclid equals parameter with an alphanumeric code after it that will tell Google Analytics the campaign keyword device.

All of the different types of information pieces behind the Google Ads campaign that that user came from, but it’s only going to use this Google click ID. It will not utilize the UTM parameters or any additional values that you would need to track anything outside of the Google Analytics platform. Now, what that means is a couple of things.

First, I will always suggest that you utilize auto-tagging in Google Ads because opting into this function means that your Google Analytics account will track all of the different variables from your Google Ads campaigns, whether you manually tag them ON there or not. This is a much more thorough set of tagging. I would always suggest that you do it.

And the second thing that that means is that there are a lot of other tracking parameters that we need to add in place if you are going to utilize any platform outside of Google Analytics. And odds are the vast majority of you are doing some sort of CRM tracking something with your e-commerce campaigns, but just know that any additional platforms will need to have a different set of parameters applied. They’re not going to be able to decipher that Google Ads click ID.

So all of the remaining trackings is going to show up in this tracking section where you can use URL options. So let’s open this up, and here you can see the additional fields that we will use to track our campaigns in Google Ads. For the time being, I’m going to skip this tracking template section because we’re going to talk a lot about that here in just a little bit. But instead, I’m going to give really quick notes on this final URL suffix and parallel tracking.

So first is the final URL suffix. This is going to be a field that is very similar to the tracking template, but in my mind, has a few pieces that are just a little bit more advanced than most people probably need. While you will have to add some additional characters to the tracking template section to make it work that you wouldn’t have to add to the final URL suffix, I still think it’s worth using the tracking template.

In this help article, you can see that the final URL suffix was created to have an additional piece. It’s intended to contain URL parameters that your site uses for tracking purposes. While parameters used by third-party trackers can remain in the URL template, and parameters that determine the content of the page can remain in the final URL.

Now, while that might sound easy and straightforward, if you continue reading through this help article, there are some pieces that make it seem like you can utilize these for existing accounts, new accounts, and making adjustments to existing accounts will put your account back into a review status. And all of that is just, quite frankly, way too advanced for what the vast majority of people are going to need.

So for this video, I’m really going to focus on just the tracking template and all of its different pieces because I think that’s going to be the most valuable for the vast majority of you. The last piece is parallel tracking. If you’ve been in the Google Ads interface for a while, you’re probably familiar with parallel tracking because a few years ago, this was an optional piece that you could apply to your campaigns.

You’ll see that there’s a note down here that says four hotel campaigns. So first, what is parallel tracking? Again, looking another help article, but you can see here that when you click on your ad final URL and the URL tracking load differently. This is what parallel tracking does. It allows your landing page and the tracking to load separately to ensure that your tracking is loaded quickly while the page is loading. And it won’t have an impact if your page is slow.

You’ll still be able to track everything. But if we scroll up a little bit, the one thing you will notice is that parallel tracking is mandatory for search, shopping, display, and video campaigns. The only campaigns where it’s optional is for hotel campaigns. So that’s why in the interface, it only has the hotel listed below.

So if you’re running those hotel campaigns, maybe read through this, see if it’s right for you. But for the vast majority of you advertisers out there, all of your accounts and campaigns will already be opted into parallel tracking. So now that we have all of that out of the way, I want to hop into some PowerPoint slides to walk through all of the remaining pieces that we’re going to talk about with this tracking template, the different values you’re going to need, how you can create your parameters, and what the different hierarchies are in the account.

The first set of characters you need to know for your tracking template are the ones that are in bold on the screen right now, opening curly brace, lpurl, and the closed curly brace. What this does is it dynamically pulls in your final URL at the lowest level that you’ve used it in the account setup. We’ll talk about the hierarchy levels in a little bit, but just know that this is intended to dynamically pull in your landing page URL into your tracking template.

Now, the reason for this dynamic nature is because the tracking template was originally designed, as I mentioned in the final URL suffix section, to utilize third-party tracking. And when you’re in the interface, you’ll see an example below the tracking template that looks something like this. It’s designed so you can use those tracking tools outside of Google Ads if they need to utilize a hosted URL that then redirects to your landing page URL.

If you utilize any of those types of platforms, I will almost guarantee that they will give you the instructions for what your tracking template needs to look like. But for the most part, my guess is most of you are not utilizing those types of additional third-party tools. So this type of setup isn’t what you’re going to end up with, but you’ll still need to know that dynamic lpurl variable to make sure that your landing pages are being populated in the right way.

So the next thing I want to do before we start applying anything else to the lpurl I want to talk about the parameters themselves and how those function. So the parameter formula in tracking is going to be parameter equals and value.

So, for example, a UTM source is going to be the parameter, then it’ll have equals, and then Google will be the value. In this scenario, any different parameter that you put on the end of your URL will need to follow this type of formula. You’ll need to have a name of the parameter itself and then whatever the value is that you’re trying to track. Then whenever you start putting these into a tracking template, you need to know a couple of the formatting issues.

The first is that you need to separate the landing page URL itself from the parameters with one question mark because that designates when the page content itself has ended and the tracking has begun, and then individual parameters need to be separated with an ampersand or an and sign. So let’s take a look at what that would look like in an example tracking template.

Here we have the final URL being populated by the lpurl. We’re then separating the landing page from the tracking with our question mark, and then we have the parameter one and value one for the UTM source equals Google. Then we separate our parameter tracking because the UTM source is a different parameter than the second parameter, which is UTM medium, and then we have that value associated at CPC.

If these were all of the different parameters I would want to use in my account, this is what I would add into my tracking template. This opening curly brace lpurl parameter put the question mark and then all of the tracking that I have behind it. So for those of you not using a third-party tracking tool, your tracking template should start with this lpurl question mark and then be followed by all of the different parameter values that you have in place. A

And there’s quite a lot you can do with parameters to make sure that you’re tracking everything that you want. So let’s start talking about the different ways that you can create these tracking parameters. They can either be manual or dynamic. So the UTM source that we saw earlier is manual, but anything with the curly braces is going to be dynamic. It’s the easiest way to tell them apart.

So in this previous example, this lpurl piece that is dynamic while the remaining portions of the template are manual because they’re just written in; they’re not going to change. So manual is pretty straightforward. You write what you want in there. They won’t change. Everything will always populate the exact same way you have it in the tracking template, and then you can go on with your day.

The parameters of source and medium for me are pretty simple in a Google Ads account because I’m always going to use Google as the source, and I’m always going to use CPC as the medium. But depending on what your naming convention is, those might need to change. So you can utilize some dynamic tracking which also has a couple of different options.

You can utilize either Value track or custom parameters, and both of these are going to be designated with the curly braces that we talked about just a little bit ago. So let’s talk about each of these, how they can be created and what they do. The first is going to be Value Track. So these use predefined values from Google to dynamically add information. So you’re effectively choosing from a preset list, but your information will still be dynamic.

So here are some examples of the value track parameters you can use. There’s a campaign ID which will populate the campaign ID. There is a Match Type which will add in a letter to put the match type in there for you. You can do the same for the device, but the one I want to use for an example right now is Keyword because odds are, if you’re running campaigns on Google Ads, you’re probably using some sort of search campaign, and you probably want to know what Keyword is driving performance.

So as you can see in the second column of parameters, a keyword is about in the middle of the page, and that will return the keyword from your account that was triggered by the search query. So if I were going to add this to a tracking template, it would look like this. I would retain the lpurl source equals Google medium equals CPC, added another ampersand, and then UTM term equals and then put the keyword in the curly brace.

And that will allow Google to pull the keyword that triggered that ad and apply it into the landing page URL tracking so that any platform I’m using to track my performance will see that keyword in the tracking. So again, your tracking template would just need to look like this, and the keyword itself will dynamically populate in that UTM term field every time your ad is triggered by a keyword.

So that’s how you would use Value Track at a pretty high level. If you need a more in-depth rundown of Value track parameters, you can check out the video at the top of the screen right now. It’s a whole video dedicated to them, and it might go into a little bit more detail than what we did just now.

The second type of dynamic parameters are going to be parameters that you create or custom parameters rather than the value track that Google makes for you. So in almost every layer of the account, you’ll see something that looks like this. Right now, this is a screenshot from the campaign URL where you see the tracking template, the final URL suffix. But down at the bottom, you’ll see the custom parameters, and you’ve got the opening curly brace with a name and then a value associated with it.

So if you’ll remember from that value track section, campaign ID was the only dynamic piece that will identify your campaign. There is not a campaign name dynamic value track parameter which, quite frankly I find a little bit frustrating. So I usually make my own custom parameters for that.

So let’s say I have a brand campaign that I want to be able to track. I would put together some parameters that look like this where the parameter name is curly brace underscore campaign, and then the value is going to be search brand. Anytime you want to identify something with a space in your naming convention, you can just add a plus to it.

So in this scenario, it’s really going to be search space, brand that populates, but you can’t have a space in the actual parameter. So you need to add an Identifier that will just populate as a space later, and I use Pluses for that. So to make it a little more clear, this is what it would look like in those custom parameter fields.

You’ll always be able to tell a custom parameter on Google Ads because the curly brace will always start with an underscore. You’ll notice that it’s not curly brace campaign, curly brace underscore campaign, and then the value that I associate with it. So if we were to apply this to our tracking template again, we would only need to utilize the dynamic parameter because the value itself will populate later depending on the campaign that triggered it.

So here, we would retain all the parameters we already talked about including source, medium and term. Then the last piece we’re going to add is UTM underscore campaign, and the only portion we need to add to the tracking template is the parameter name, which is the curly brace underscore campaign close curly brace.

So the last thing I want to talk about is the hierarchy. I know I mentioned that a little bit earlier, so let’s go ahead and talk about that real quick. Google will always use the most specific tracking information that you apply, and it will ignore everything above it. In a Google Ads account, you can apply tracking templates to all five levels that you see here on the right, and you can create custom parameters for a campaign ad group, ad, and keyword.

So, for example, if you have a tracking template at the ad group level and you also have one at the account level, if that ad group is what triggered your ad, Google will only use the tracking template associated with that ad group and ignore everything above it. It would ignore your account level tracking template and all of the different parameters that you’re trying to pull in at that level.

Now, the difference here is that Google will pull in your custom parameters from any level in the account as long as they are associated in your tracking template. So going back to this previous example, if I have this added as my account level tracking template, where the lpurl is there, source is Google, medium is CPC, term is keyword, and the campaign is the dynamic campaign name, then all four of these values will always be added to my individual landing page URLs.

The keyword can be applied from any campaign, any ad group, and any keyword within the account. And the campaign name will populate whatever custom parameter is applied at that campaign level.

So, as a rule of thumb, I prefer when I set up one tracking template at the account level that has all of the different dynamic parameters that I would need, and then I add in any custom parameters at different levels, like the campaign that you can see here, that would require some dynamic values being pulled in but that I don’t want to have to set at the campaign level.

You could in theory, create tracking templates for each campaign and have UTM campaign equal and then just give it the campaign name, but in my experience, that gets to be a little complicated. Sometimes people forget to change over those tracking templates, and it’s easier to ensure that you’re utilizing the dynamic custom parameters rather than adjusting your tracking template for every single campaign; that’s just a personal preference.

There’s no real wrong way to do it, as long as you’re paying attention to the hierarchy that you can see here and making sure that if you write a tracking template at the ad level that you’ve included all the parameters you need from all the other levels to make sure that it’s pulling in all the different pieces that you need for proper tracking.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this video, there are a number of different ways that you can track the performance of your Google Ads campaigns. Hopefully, this overview has given you a better understanding of how each of them work, how they work in conjunction with each other, and how you can customize your tracking to make sure that you’re pulling in all the information you need without having to manually tag every single thing in your account,

Just like always, if I left something out, or if you have any additional questions, feel free to leave us a note in the comments below.

Written by Michelle Morgan