TOP Settings for Full Control in Google Ads: From UTM Tags to Calls

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 how to turn it on and what exactly you need to do in order to receive maximum efficiency. One single step after enabling AutoTagging.

Igor Ivitskiy, 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.

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 ads, 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. Gb rate ID 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's 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 their 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 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=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 page that you put in your ads. Then you can add any parameter. For example, UTM source equals Google. 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. Also 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 pays 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 on an 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? 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 lpurl 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. At 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 types 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 allows user 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 hotel campaigns. 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. Call reporting and its hidden threat. Just imagine the situation. You are using the call asset in your Google Ads or you are using call-only ads. So user can just click on your ads or on asset on your ads and call you. You launched your Google Ads. It works quite good. Users call you, ask questions, pay you money in the end. But if user will save this number and try to call you again, let's say in a month, he will call to absolutely other business. Why? Because if call reporting is turned on, on your account, Google, instead of your numbers, substitute into the ads Google own redirected numbers. And when somebody calls to this number, Google redirects it to you or to another advertiser in the future. So let's see where you can change or choose the option for you. In the Admin Account Settings menu, you can find Call Reporting. If you will read the Google Ads Help, you can see that call reporting which runs on Google forwarding numbers And you can also see nice explanation how this forwarding works. Customers get routed through a Google forwarding number, which allows you to gather this data about the call. So it works like a free call tracking. But in case of another call tracking tools, you can buy separate pool of phone numbers and work only with these phone numbers. So in case if user will decide to call you again in a month with a separate call tracking tool, this user will still call to you. But in case of Google forwarding numbers, nobody knows who will answer the call. If you want to turn off this feature, if you want your users to call directly to you without any substitutes, without any forwarding numbers, just turn on this option and press Save. In case if you will decide to enrich your data with the information about call duration, about number of calls, and so on, you can turn on this option. And even choose to save calls for 30 days. And if you have third-party provider for call analytics, you can send this data to the third-party provider. But in this case, you should be aware if user will save this number and will try to call you even tomorrow, it's high probability that the user will call to absolutely another business. Understanding Google Lead Form Ads terms. Why it's so important and what hidden options you can find inside these terms. First of all, my personal opinion. I've tried the asset lead forms in Google Ads several times and it never was successful. If you had cases when lead form gave you high quality leads, really important valuable leads for your business, please share your experience in the comments. And now let's read your Lead Form Ads terms that you can find in admin panel, account settings, Lead Form Ads terms. And I will highlight you several important moments. First of all, if you are using the lead forms, you need to do it in accordance with your privacy policy. So in your privacy policy have to exist information about using these lead forms. Especially if you serve clients in the European Union where the laws about data privacy are very strict. So second nuance, you will not sell the information provided by users. And sell is quite wide term. So under the sell, Google can understand if you just gave these leads to your partner and then receive some affiliate commission for this. So we can call it like indirect selling. In the case of lead form, it's prohibited. And one more detail, you cannot share this data with data broker or partners. So if you are working in affiliate niche and you want to generate leads through lead forms and then share them with some data broker or some company, it's prohibited by Google Ads terms. Of course, you can say, "I've done it for years and Google never banned me for this reason." And all of us understand that these terms just to keep Google clear from any laws, from any nuances linked to lead forms and personal data. But if you are using lead form asset, just add this information to your privacy policy and at least you will be protected in this term. If you want to know more about Google Ads, watch this video and of course subscribe to my channel. See you in the next videos.