Igor Ivitskiy shows how to set up tracking templates in Google Ads to tag traffic from different sources. Without proper UTM parameters, you can't tell which channels actually work and waste budget on ineffective ones. He walks through adding parameters at account, campaign, and ad levels, then testing to catch broken URLs.
How to set up a tracking template, why it's important, and how it can enrich your data, your analytics with new information.
Igor Levitsky, Dr. Edds, PhD, the Young Scientist of the Year in Ukraine. Since 2006, he has been applying mathematics to optimize Google Ads. Named Europe's best PPC speaker by Ads World Experience. One of the leading Google Ads experts in the world. A professional educator. Over 4,000 entrepreneurs have increased their sales after taking his courses. A practicing expert. Igor's clients generate $50 million in profit from Google Ads each month.
So first of all, let's understand why we should use tracking templates and tracking parameters. Just imagine a situation when you have several sources of traffic to your website. For example, you have Google Ads, Meta Ads, Reddit Ads, social media marketing, you have some links in your emails, and so on. So you have 10 different sources of traffic and you have some conversions on your website, some leads who leave their contact information on your site. At one point, when you will think about increasing your advertising budget, increasing your activity, you will ask yourself, how many leads, how much money every single traffic source gave me in the past. As Walmart founder once said, "I'm sure that 50% of my marketing budget just wasting of money, but the problem is I don't know which exactly 50%." So you need to have at least one way to connect your traffic sources with your analytical data. If we speak only about Google Ads and Google Analytics, then no worries, you have auto-tagging. When you enable auto-tagging and link accounts of Google Ads and Google Analytics, it starts to work in extremely efficient way. But if you use, let's say, another analytics system or another traffic source, not only Google Ads, in this case, you need to think how can you mark or tag your links to be able to determine from which exactly traffic source came this user. Let's go to my website just for example. This is the link to my website. What if I will add to this link some data, some parameter, let's say utm_source equals Google. In this case, my website didn't change at all. So the same appearance, the same picture, all the same. Even if I will add the random data in this utm_source as long as I can, nothing changes. These parameters serve only to have the analytics data to distinguish users who came from one advertising on one social media platform from another. And you can use these parameters to enrich your analytics data. I'm taking 32 seconds to share something important with you so you can stop wasting your ad budget. I've managed over $700 million in Google Ads.— so all my insights are tested and proven. I regularly talk to senior leaders at Google, and I'm an official Google Partner. My students, entrepreneurs all over the world, have already optimized their ad campaigns, cut costs, and boosted sales using my methods. These strategies work for any budget, whether it's $500 or $5 million. I invite you to use these proven methods too. Click the link in the description and make your ads more effective. Let's start from simple example. So you can add these parameters at account level, at campaign level, at ad group level, and ad level. Let's start from account level. If you will go to admin account settings, you will find tracking template where you can add this parameter. Always as a first step, add the LP URL parameter. LP URL is your landing page URL. In the brackets, it means that Google will change with this parameter the actual landing pages that you put in your ads. Then you can add any parameter. For example, UTM source equals Google. What does it mean? It means that every single click that came from Google Ads will have after landing page URL this part. And you can see, okay, these users came from Google. But what if you want to have more detailed data. For example, you want to understand from which campaign this user came. There are two ways how to implement it. So, first way. At the account level, you can add parameter, let's say, "utm_campaign=" and add value track parameters. In the Google Ads help, you can find a variety of value track parameters. There are dozens of them. In our case, if we want to track exact campaign, we need campaign ID parameter. Just copy this parameter and pass here. After this, Google will add to every single click information about ID of campaign. The numbers ID of campaign usually looks like this. So some numbers. But what if you want to see in your analytics data not just ID of this campaign, but the name of this campaign? You can go one level down to the campaign level and add here UTM source equals Google, UTM campaign equals and give some name to this campaign. Also, you can add the tracking template parameter to ad group level and to your ad level. You can ask, what if I will add these parameters to every single layer that I have? In this case, Google only pay attention to the lowest layer. So if there is an ad level tracking template in place, Google will only use this level. If there is no tracking template on ad level, Google will look at group level. If it's empty as well, Google will look at campaign level. If it's empty at account level, and if it's empty, Google will add nothing to your final URL. One recommendation from me, always after you implement some tracking templates, double-check your ads. Because if you did some mistake, let's say in some parameter, it can completely destroy your ad campaign and users can land to error page or just another page of your website. So always carefully pay attention to the data that you put in tracking template. Also, I highly recommend you to watch this video because in this video I will give you more details and more advices about Google Ads. Subscribe to my channel and see you in the new videos.
