Make Informed Decisions Through Accurate Tracking

Post by Jennifer

When you are conducting online search engine marketing, there are countless minute settings and details that need to be monitored. Tracking is one of the most important aspects of search engine marketing –– only by correctly setting up tracking can we evaluate the results and make intelligent decisions in the future.

Running search engine marketing ads without setting up tracking, or through inaccurate tracking is like flying by the seat of your pants. By not accurately tracking where your traffic, leads, and conversions are coming from, every decision you make has a higher risk than any decision you make with the correct tracking.

If you are online search engine marketer, you are aware of the countless analytics tools and systems that can help track your search ads online, like Google Analytics, AdStage, Hubspot, etc. Do you want to know what device the clicks are coming from? What percentage of your traffic is using a mobile device? How do we match the text ad conversions with the analytics system? If you’re using multiple agencies, how do you know which one is more successful? If you’re using Google Ads and any analytics platform, we can easily help you solve all of these problems through you guessed it– tracking.

For those of you that spend your days in your own or your client’s Google Ads account, this page will be very familiar to you. When you are in your Google Ads account, go to Ad & Extensions on the left navigation, then either add a new text ad or edit an existing one. Now, take a look in the red box to see the function called, “Ad URL Options”.

Click this dropdown to see more details:



The tracking template area is where you put tracking information. You can use URL parameters to customize your final URL. When an ad is clicked, the information is used to create your landing page URL.

The easiest way to start tracking information about your ads is by using ValueTrack parameters. ValueTrack parameters are a type of URL parameter you can add to your ads’ landing page URLs. These parameters collect information about the source of your ad clicks. By adding these parameters to your ads and campaigns, you can learn if people who clicked on your ads came from mobile devices, where they were physically located when they clicked your ads, and much more.

Example of ValueTrack templates:

{lpurl}?utm_medium=googleads&utm_campaign={campaign}&adgroupid={adgroupid}&utm_term={keyword}&utm_matchtype={matchtype}&utm_device={device}

The above example tracks your medium (Google Ads), campaign, ad group ID, the keyword that triggered the ad, the keyword match type, as well as the device that clicked the ad.

You can also define your own templates like {lpurl}?utm_agency=CenterRock. By using this parameter, it is clear that every lead generated from a text ad using it can be allocated to CenterRock Advertising.

Once you decide what information you want to collect, you can use the “Test” button to ensure that your tracking is set up correctly. Once you click “Test,” Google Ads will combine your final URL with any tracking you set up to make sure your ad will lead to a live and accurate landing page URL.

There will be a pop-up window that tells you if the landing page has been found. In this example, the default medium is googleads. The campaign, ad group ID, keywords, match type, and the device will automatically change based on which campaign - ad group - keywords - match type and device triggered by search term.





You could also click the URL to check if it works.

https://www.centerrockadvertising.com/?utm_medium=googleads&utm_campaign=RealEstate&adgroupid=63860665365&utm_term=&utm_matchtype=&utm_device=c

Note: device=c, c means computer.

The final URL suffix field allows you to enter parameters that will be attached to the end of your landing page URL in order to track information about where people go after they click your ad.

Custom parameters are an advanced type of URL parameter that you can add to your ad’s landing page URLs. Unlike ValueTrack parameters, you can choose what values your custom parameters record once someone clicks on your ad.

For example, you could organize all your Black Friday ads in one virtual ad group called “BlackFriday” and virtual campaign called “Holiday”.

Example of Custom parameters:

{_adgroup}=BlackFriday

{_campaign}=Holiday

https://www.centerrockadvertising.com/?utm_agency=CenterRock&utm_medium=googleads&utm_campaign=Holiday&adgroup=BlackFriday&utm_term=&utm_matchtype=&utm_device=c

When people click any Black Friday ad and then make a purchase, you will be able to know which ads caused a purchase and how much people paid. If you find this tracking technique successful, you can write more ads in a similar style in order to increase future purchase data. It’s also very helpful if you are managing a large Google Ads account, with thousands of keywords and hundreds of similar text ads.

You can create or edit the URL options at the account, campaign, ad group, keyword, or sitelink level. Setting up URL options at the ad group, campaign, or account level means that you can update your tracking information without re-submitting your ads for approval. However, if you set up or edit at the ad, keyword, or sitelink level, they will still need to go through review.

Now that you know how to set up the tracking you need in Google Ads, you’ll be able to comprehend what the data says and form action steps to improve performance in the future. “The goal is to turn data into information, and information into insight.” - Carly Fiorina. Are you ready? Let’s get tracking!