Google Ads ValueTrack Parameters

Tracking is critically important to the success of pretty much any digital advertising campaign. You need to know what’s working, what’s not, what areas of the account you need to optimize. We’ve put together a video on the custom parameters that you can set up in Google ads, you can check that video out right here. That allows you to create parameter names for different areas of your account.

But, sometimes you don’t want to have to do that, but then you also don’t want to have to manually tag every single URL with the important information that you need to track. The nice part is Google already has a set of value track parameters, or preset dynamic parameters that you can utilize in your campaigns.

So in this video, I’m going to give a quick recap on how to set up tracking parameters in your account, and then, I’m going to talk through a number of the different value track parameters that Google has available, and how you can utilize them for your campaigns.

I want to do a quick recap that will also lead us into talking about what value track parameters are. When you encounter an ad that has tracking parameters on the web, it’s going to look something like this. Paidmediapros.com UTM source equals Google, and a lot of other parameters after that.

If you break it down, you have the website is Paidmediapros.com and then everything after that is a tracking parameter designed to tell that advertiser or marketer whoever it is a little bit about you, where you came from, maybe the device you’re using, all sorts of things, so that they can optimize their marketing or promotional efforts later on, based on that information that they found out.

It might look a little bit messy in this format, but there are a handful of different parameters that are in here. Basically, all we’re ever trying to do is get information into specific categories that we use.

So if we break down this first tracking parameter we see here, the UTM source equals Google, the information is going to look something like this. The parameter is going to be the UTM source, and the value is Google. So in any report that I would run in Google analytics or a CRM, the source is going to be Google if it’s coming from this URL, that’s basically what we’re trying to figure out. We can then change the value based on the different platform that we’re on, or any of those other parameters will tell us different information about the user or where they came from.

So the main benefit to the value track parameters is that rather than having to manually encode Google into this, I could utilize some sort of value track parameter that Google has available. These will always have the curly brace around them, and what that means is it’s dynamic based on the information in the Google ads platform.

So right now, I have it set up as UTM source and then a dynamic parameter, but it could be any of the other parameters that we have in there. Could be source, medium, term, or it could be some other non-UTM parameter that you have available, that your CRM will track. So this is going to be the benefit of the value track parameters, because you don’t have to put in all of this manually encoded information, but you can get a lot of data out of it.

All of your tracking parameters can be set up in a couple different ways in Google ads, first, they can be applied on the final URL, meaning that you would put in your paidmediapros.com and then type in all of your tracking parameters after it. Or you could add them at the tracking template level, where all you have to do is add the LP URL in curly braces at the beginning and then all of your tracking parameters afterward.

I personally like the tracking template option, because it allows you more flexibility, your final URL then only has to say in this example, paidmediapros.com, and there’s a lot of ways you can customize these tracking templates. The most important one for me, being that you can set them up at a lot of different levels within your account. You can have an account level tracking template, you can have one at the campaign level, ad group level, you can even have them at the keyword level and then the most obvious option is the one at the ad level.

I personally love using the three that you see on the screen right now, because it doesn’t require me to change any of my tracking templates based on keyword or ad option. I can adjust them at the ad group, campaign or even just have one tracking template set up at the account level that encapsulates every click that is on my ads within the entire account.

Just like anything else in Google ads, if you have a campaign level tracking template set up, it will override the account tracking template, an ad group level will override the campaign and account level settings, because it is more specific. Think about how specific you want to be in setting these up, and make sure you craft your templates to encapsulate as much as you can.

So now that we’ve talked a little bit about how they work, let’s actually talk about what we can track with these value track parameters. So for this, I’m going to hop into a Google ads help article and we’ll talk through some of the examples.

This help article I’ll put the link to it in the show notes, it has everything we want to know about setting up value track parameters, it talks about how you can apply them to campaigns, it’ll even show you where you can apply them within the account depending on where you want to do it. But the portion I’m going to focus on is down here, in the available value track parameters.

The first thing you’ll notice is that there are different sections based on different aspects of the account. There’s final URL, tracking template or custom parameter, tracking template only, final URL only, but then there are also different value track parameters based on different campaigns, we’ll talk about these in a minute.

But we have shopping, video, hotel and discovery ads campaigns. Basically, each of these sections only houses the available value track parameters based on those pieces. So the shopping campaigns are going to have value track parameters that are only available for shopping campaigns, pretty self-explanatory.

Now, long story short, there are far too many value track parameters for me to talk through in this video, otherwise we’d be here for an hour and a half. So rather than doing that, I’m going to focus on a couple of sections and talk through a couple of examples that I think are pretty useful, and maybe talk about how you can apply them in your campaigns.

So the first, I’m not going to look at final URL or tracking template only, but I am going to look at this option that has all of them available. So the first thing to know is how to read this information section, what it’s going to tell you is what the parameter is or what value you’re able to put in, so for this one it’s going to be campaign id, and you would basically apply it to your campaigns by utilizing this exact language, this syntax. Open curly brace, campaign id, no spaces, close curly brace. So that’s how it would look in your final URL tracking template or custom parameter. Then the only other piece of information is what it returns, and this is going to be the campaign id.

Google gives a little bit of information about when you might want to use this, and you can either take that into account or not. But basically, there’s going to be a numeric value that is your campaign id, there’s a column for it in Google ads, and when you utilize this parameter, it’s going to pull that in.

The same would be for ad group id, feed id, extension, target id, all these different things are going to pull in a numeric value that ties back to that specific portion of your account. Personally, I do not love using campaign or ad group ids, it’s part of the reason why I utilize the custom parameters that I talked about in the video that I mentioned in the intro of this video, because I don’t know what that 10-digit number means just by looking at it. I would then have to go back and match it up to campaigns, so on and so forth.

But depending on how you’re tracking things, these numbers could make sense for you. But overall, the biggest takeaway here is that the parameter is going to be how you would apply this to the portion of your account, and then what it returns is what the value is going to be, so you can start to determine if you want to use these parameters or not.

The couple of options I wanted to highlight that I think are pretty cool are going to be down here a little bit further. The first is match type, we can use UTM term and put the keyword in curly brackets as you can see down here, keyword is an option and it’s going to return the keyword that you have in your search campaigns, but it doesn’t include anything that’s about match type.

So if you want to know what the match type is, you can utilize this parameter and it’ll give you a value of either E for exact P for phrase or B for broad. So now either your Google analytics account or your CRM will have a little bit further information about which variant of that keyword returned the performance that you’re seeing.

You can also get further information based on the network that people are using, you can just add network into your tracking parameters and it’ll give you a G for Google search, S for search partners, which can be really cool if you’re trying to evaluate the conversion performance of Google search versus search partners, but then there are also line items for display, smart shopping, YouTube, YouTube search and Google video partners.

So you can get a lot more information about the network people are using. You can also get more information on the device that people are using whether it’s mobile, tablet or computer. If you’re utilizing display network campaigns, you can even start to see the device model. So you could return a value of Apple plus iPhone to know exactly the device model that people are using.

Now these reports are already available in Google analytics, but if you’re utilizing a CRM or some additional analytics platform that doesn’t have these reports built in, this is a great way to get a little bit more information out of it. Again, there are tons of different parameters you can use for these different areas, and I’m going to skip past a lot of them because there’s only so much that I can talk about. But give each of those a look and see if any of them might make sense for you.

The next section I want to talk about are shopping campaigns, so if we open this up we can see that there are different parameters for the ad type that we’re utilizing. But then we can also come down and find the different merchant IDs, product channel, the product id itself, as well as the country, language and then the partition id, which is the unique id for the product group that the clicked product ad belongs to.

There’s a lot of information you can get out of it that is really specific just to shopping campaigns. But then even further down, hotel campaigns, if you run these there’s a lot of really cool information that you can get out of these. You can get everything from the hotel id, the ad type, but you can also get information about the user’s travel start day, month and year and the end day, month and year.

The number of adults that are coming, all sorts of different information based on what the user is trying to book. So there’s plenty of information that you can get out of these. I would encourage you to look through each of these different sections, see what’s available, ad position is one that I didn’t talk about but you can track where your ads show up.

So based on the information they have here, you could see 1t2 means that you are on page one at the top in position two. We no longer have average position information in the Google ads platform, but this would give you some sort of insight as to where you’re showing up. So I encourage you to read through all of these, see what’s available and decide if it’s going to be a value for your campaigns. I know this is a really quick overview, but again there are too many different value track parameters for me to go through, and there are going to be a lot that have nothing to do with your campaigns, you can’t use them, but there might be some that save you a decent amount of time.

You might go through here and find something that you’ve been coding in manually that you don’t need to do anymore. I would love to hear any questions that you have about value track parameters that I missed, or any instances where you’ve used these parameters to track something that you didn’t think was available before, that you think would be valuable to the community. If you feel like sharing, drop a note in the comments below and maybe help out somebody else as well.

Written by Michelle Morgan