Stop Losing Data in Google Ads — Tracking Secrets You Need to Know

Auto-tagging in Google Ads. How to set up, enable it, how it actually works, why it is important, and which one step is always missing in tutorial videos about auto-tagging. In this video, I will show you how to turn it on and what exactly you need to do in order to receive maximum efficiency. So first question, what is auto-tagging? If we want to receive maximum value from Google Analytics and Google Ads, we need somehow to link this particular user who just clicked on your ads and the user on your website who did some actions. You have different manual ways how to connect Analytics and Google Ads. For example, UTM tags, but they're quite limited and you cannot link particular users. You can link only group of users who marked with one the same UTM tag. Auto-tagging gives you ability to link single user in Google Ads with single user in Google Analytics. How it works? When somebody clicks on your ad— let's click on this ad— you can see that Google added to the link the gbrid parameter. This parameter can be different for different devices. GBRATEID or Google Click ID, GCLID. So in my case, when I clicked from Safari browser, I have this parameter. When I clicked from Google Chrome browser, I have this parameter. For us, it doesn't matter. It just gives ability to Google Analytics read this data and then link this data with information from Google Ads about path of this user, which exactly ad it clicked, from which audience it was, and how much did it cost. Also, it gives ability to Google Ads to understand how the users who click on ads behave on their websites. To set up to enable auto-tagging, it's quite easy procedure. You need to click in your Google Ads account on Admin, Account Settings, find Auto-tagging, and just check this checkbox and press Save. By the way, share in the comments who had this option already activated in your accounts. But this is not enough for successful exchange of data. You need to do one more step. Go to Tools, Data Manager, and click Connect Product. Then in Data Source find Google Analytics GA4. Select your Google Analytics account and press Next. After this, just press button Link and that's it. You will have connected product Google Analytics GA4 in your Data Manager tab. That's it. After you did these two steps, you have enabled auto-tagging and activated exchange of data between Google Analytics and Google Ads. Thanks to this exchange, both systems will work better for you for efficiency of your ads. How to set up a tracking template, why it is important, and how it can enrich your data, your analytics with new information. 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 the contact information on your side. 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 Wall Market 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=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. Final URL suffix. Why we need this option and how it works.

Igor Ivitsky, Dr. Eds, 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.

First of all, if you are not aware what is tracking template, tracking parameter, UTM tag, and so on, I highly recommend you to watch my previous video where I exactly step by step explained how tracking template works, why it's important, how we use it, how it appears in user's eyes, and so on. So if you are new to tracking template concept, please watch this video first. In this video, I will share the difference between tracking template and final URL and why we need to use final URL instead of tracking template in some cases. So let's say we have two options. We want to track our users and we can add the UTM parameters using the tracking template, or we can add the same parameters using the final URL. The question is, what is the difference? There is no difference at all. So these two options will work extremely the same. Absolutely the same. We need only choose one of them. Or just use final URL without tracking template, or add this data on tracking template level without final URL. What is the difference? The main difference is that in case of tracking template, you have to add the LP URL parameter and question mark, and only after this you can add your UTM or any other parameters. In case of final URL suffix, you need to just add the parameters after the question mark. Like in my case, UTM source, UTM campaign, and so on. Personally, I prefer the final URL suffix because in this case you will never make a mistake that can lead to broken links from Google Ads. So if you, for example, in tracking template, if you did some mistakes, you will have a problem with your URLs of your ads. In this case, Google just adds this data after your landing page URL and you will have no problem at all. Even if you add here something absolutely random. As well as for tracking template, you can add final URL suffix at the campaign level, at ad group level, and at ad level. Google always chooses the lower layer, so priority has always the lower layer in your hierarchy. If you have final URL at ad level, Google will use it. If only at ad group level, will ignore all other levels. So I recommend you always use the final URL at the level that necessary for you. And only if you need a specific setup, let's say you set up some end-to-end analytics system and developers of this system ask you to put some different tracking template, some unique tracking template from this particular, uh, end-to-end analytics system. In this case, of course, you can use tracking template. But if your user case just to mark your traffic for yourself, for your analytics, always use final URL. Also, if you use only Google Ads and Google Analytics, it is enough to enable auto-tagging. It'll link the data automatically even without any tags. But if you use some additional analytics or additional traffic sources, you can use final URL to distinguish these clicks from another one. Myth about parallel tracking. You can find a lot of videos and articles on the internet when authors advise you to turn on parallel tracking. They say that you have to enable parallel tracking in order to increase the speed of loading of your landing page, in order to increase the overall efficiency of your ads. So what is parallel tracking? Without this option, Google Ads, when user clicks on your ads, will send the click first to special tracking URL where Google collects data about this user. And only after this, Google will redirect this user to your website. Yes, it's very fast. It's faster than 1 second, but still it's some type of delay. With parallel tracking, Google sends user immediately on your landing page and track all the details about this user on the backend. In this case, immediately after click, user lands to your website without any delays, without any lags. So in general, sounds very good. And you can find a lot of videos on YouTube or articles where they advise you to turn on the parallel tracking manually in the settings of your account. But let's look to this setting together. You can find it in Admin, Account Settings. Here is the Tracking tab and Parallel Tracking option. You can turn on or turn off this option. And the first question that I can ask, it's only for hotel campaigns, isn't it? Yes, exactly. If you will press on this question mark and learn more, you will find that parallel tracking is default option for Search, Shopping, Display, and Video campaigns. For all of these type of campaigns, parallel tracking works by default without any interaction from your side. You don't need to enable this option if you, like 99% of marketers, use only Search, Shopping Display, and Video campaigns. Only if you are using Hotel campaigns, specific Hotel campaigns that allow users to book the hotel immediately from the search results page, in this case, you can turn it on. As you can see, this option is applicable only for, for all different types of campaigns is default option. You need to touch nothing. So if you will see in the future advices about enabling of parallel tracking, just be aware that these advices are outdated at least for 6 years. Seasonality adjustments. In this video, we will speak about feature inside Google Ads that very small amount of advertisers are actually aware of and use it. Let's say you have the situation when next month you will have a really big sale with a huge price drop, with a huge amount of clicks. And during this sale, during this discounting, you want to increase your campaign budget. But your experience says you that if you will dramatically increase your budget, let's say in 2 or 3 times, Google will start learning phase again and at least several days and possible even week you will have very fluctuate results in your efficiency of your ads. So What if you want to increase your budget for a week, but you don't want to send algorithm back to learning phase? You want to save the stability of your ads. In this case, you can use Seasonality Adjustments. You can go to the Tools, Adjustments, and you will find Seasonality Adjustments. I'm going to show you an example. Let's say you want during this week, you want to increase your budget by $100. It was, let's say, $200 per day. You want to increase it to $300 per day. So add additional $100. You choose adjustment type, type budget. You can give the name to this adjustment. Let's say the biggest discount. Then you need to choose the start time and end time. Start time, the day and time when your budgets will increase by amounts that you set up. And end time when your budgets will return to its normal state. You need to choose the campaigns that will participate in this adjustment and particular adjustments. Let's say, in the currency of your account. In my case, let's say, $100. After I will save it, Google, for the campaign that I have chosen, starting from this date, will increase the daily budget by $100. And after the end time, Google will revert to the value immediately before the adjustment was active. So Google will return it to the initial state. You can create these adjustments for different events in your business. Also, you have another type of adjustment, the conversion rate. How it works? Let's say you plan to decrease your prices by 10%, and you know from the past experience that usually when you decrease the prices so dramatically, users start to buy your products twice more effectively. So previously only 5 users out of 100 bought some products. Now you know that 10 users out of 100 will buy these products. So you can increase the conversion rate that you expect to change, let's say, by 100%. Twice. So previously, for example, it was 5% conversion rate. Now it will be 10% conversion rate for when this sale or when this discount window works. But to be honest, I can't imagine that small or medium business can predict the exact conversion rate changing after some actions. Of course, for companies like Amazon, like Disney, and so on, they have mathematical models based on which they can predict exact conversion rate changes. But for us, for small-medium businesses, it's not so obvious that some of our actions will change the conversion rate in exact percent. So to be honest, I've never used this particular type of adjustment, but if you will find the application to the conversion rate adjustment in your account, let me know how you use it in the comment sections. It'll be really interesting for me. But of course you can use the budget adjustments for any date-based events in your business in order to preventing Google Ads algorithms going again to the learning phase for your campaigns. Data exclusions inside Google Ads. Why you need to exclude some data from Google Ads? Let's imagine the situation: your programmer or your webmaster doing some renovation on your website, and during this renovation, he plays with scripts, he plays with Google Tag Manager, and after this, when he did some mistakes, some error with data, you see inside your Google Ads a thousand conversions from nowhere. And this thousand conversions completely pollute your data because let's say you previously had 10 conversions per day. Now you have this spike with a thousand conversions and then again 10 conversions per day. So if you will check like a monthly or annual report in Google Ads, this 1,000 conversions will affect all of your data. It will artificially decrease your cost per action. It will artificially increase your conversion rate. So it will pollute your data. Or let's say you had some attack of bots, of spam, of fake leads. And usually you had like 10, 20 leads per day, but yesterday you received 500 Bots, 500 forms filled by nonexistent customers, and Google Ads thinks that Google Ads brought you 500 conversions. And again, it will pollute your data, it will pollute the algorithm data, because algorithm will think that, whoa, really good source of conversion. I brought to this user 500 conversions. This user did nothing. So it means that I can find another conversions like this from another fake leads, from another bots, from another click fraud traffic. If you had this situation, you can go to the Tools, Adjustments, Exclusions, and create new data exclusions. You need to give name to this exclusion, like let's say "Bot attack." You need to indicate start date and time when you First observed— better, like an hour before first lead or first fake conversions. And end time— an hour after last fake lead or last fake conversion was indicated in your Google Ads. Now you can choose if it affects all campaigns or some particular campaigns. Let's say only like one search campaign. Usually I don't use the changes for devices. Usually I exclude all data and you press Save. After this, Google will extract this particular data about conversions from start time to end time. And when next time you will check your data for the previous period, the data will be not polluted by the fake conversions, fake leads, or wrong— mistaken conversions. But more important, Google also excludes this data from the algorithm, so it will no more optimize your ads by the wrong data. If this situation familiar to you and you faced the bot attacks or whatever else situation when you observed a lot of conversions, please share with me this information in the comments. And see you in the next videos.

Bye!