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Adwords campaign tracking through smart links

Hello everybody,

I use this tool https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033867?hl=en&rd=1 to build smart links. It works great when visitors are coming from third-party-websites. However, when they come to us by clicking a link from Google Adwords, smart links do not seem to work. Clicky does show me that they came to our page through advertising but the info I provided in the links (e.g. campaign name) is lost.
I disabled automatical tagging in Adwords.

Any solutions will be highly appreciated.

Best Regards,
Carsten

Posted Fri Mar 28 2014 1:46a by ***


Hello Carsten,

I can confirm from experience that the URL builder tool works with Google Adwords and Clicky.

Can you check if AdWords links are constructed properly? Inside AdWords navigation, go to Tools -> Ad Preview and Diagnostics and try a search for which your ad is showing. The underlying URL will look something like https://adwords.google.com/d/AdPreview/adclick.html?adtest=on&adurl=... and you should inspect the string after adurl= to see if tracking tags (utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign) are preserved.

Best,
Ivan A.

Posted Fri Mar 28 2014 5:11a by drkskwl***


Hello Ivan,

thanks for your reply.

The link looks like this (example):

http://www.viadesk.de/social-intranet?utm_source%3DSocial%252BIntranet%26utm_medium%3Dad%26utm_campaign%3DAdwords%252BSocial%252BIntranet

This is interesting since I want Adwords to use this Link:

www.viadesk.de/social-intranet?utm_source=Social%2BIntranet&utm_medium=ad&utm_campaign=Adwords%2BSocial%2BIntranet

Do you think it has something to do with the "=" and "&" characters?

Best Regards,
Carsten

Posted Fri Mar 28 2014 5:50a by ***


For some reason these values are getting URL Encoded (why you're seeing %3D and so on). The ampersand (&) and equal sign (=) denote a new query string and its value and cannot be URL encoded to work properly. This might be the stem of your problem. My suggestion would be to try to recreate the URL so that these values are not URL encoded and update your AdWords campaign.

Posted Fri Mar 28 2014 9:55a by ringo***


Like what ringo64 said. However if practical, I'd suggest you copy your ads instead of editing them, because you will lose all stats after the edit.

Ivan A.

Posted Fri Mar 28 2014 12:53p by drkskwl***


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