Google Ads Tracking Template: How to Track Google Ads Performance With Ease?

It would help if you tracked your ad’s clicks regardless of whether you are a newbie or a veteran in PPC marketing. For any professional PPC manager, getting as much information about your users as possible is essential to maximizing ROI.

Google Ads tracking templates assist you in managing your campaigns. By tracking URLs, you can see which devices or networks are generating the most traffic for you. In this article, you will learn how to use Google Ads tracking template.

Let’s begin.

What is Google Ads Tracking Template?

Google Ads tracking template helps you determine the source of ad clicks. This template allows you to specify URL parameters containing information about the device, network, keyword, etc. that triggered the click.

You put tracking information in the tracking template. Your final URL can be customized using URL parameters. Whenever an ad is clicked, the URL for the landing page is created.

Tracking templates at the ad group, campaign, or account level apply to all ads in that group, campaign, or account.

• Tracking templates can be defined at different levels, with the most specific template being used at the top level.
• Tracking templates are arranged in order of specificity, starting with keyword, then ad, ad group, campaign, and then account.
• In the “Tracking template source” column, you can see which tracking template is being used.

Why Do People Use Tracking Templates?

The use of a Google Ads tracking template in an ads account can be beneficial for a number of reasons. Unlike Google’s default analytics, it provides users with a lot more information about the clicks they receive. Google Analytics does not collect any personally identifiable information by default.

It means that no IP addresses, referrers, or device IDs are collected. Consequently, it is challenging for PPC managers to know whether their marketing efforts attract the right type of users.

Additionally, marketers should take advantage of this data to continuously improve and refine their Google Ads campaigns. Several interesting insights can be derived from collecting more data from individuals. In particular:

• What are the most common devices users use when clicking your ads?
• What display network websites generate the most clicks?
• Do the clicks come from the same IP address or network?

You can both improve your targeting options and increase your overall ROI by utilizing this data.

How Do I Set up A Google Ads Tracking Template?

In Google Ads tracking template, you can add additional information to the URL to identify an ad click’s source. The URL parameters can, for example, indicate which campaign and ad copy the user clicked on. Additionally, you will know what type of device the user used and what keyword triggered the advertisement.

Consider the case of a Jeans company that sells Jeans online. If the user clicks on advertisement, you would like them to be directed to this landing page: https://www.bluejeansexample.com/bluejeansdetail

It is possible to set the tracking template so that it tracks, for each individual click, which campaign, ad group, and keyword triggered the ad:

{lpurl}?campaignid={campaignid}&adgroupid={adgroupid}&keyword={keyword}&device={device}

In Google Ads, each [parameter] is replaced with the actual value when the ad is served. As an example, {lpurl} represents the landing page’s final URL, and {campaignid} represents the campaign ID determined by the campaign system.

This is how information is passed back to you for each individual click when you specify the information as a parameter in the URL:

• In the case of ValueTrack parameters, the Google Ads system will instantiate the parameter with the actual value assigned by the system.
• Whenever you specify a custom parameter, the system will initialize it with the value you specify.

In the case of a mobile device user searching for “jeans” and clicking on your ad, you will see that they clicked on the URL:

https://www.bluejeansexample.com/bluejeansdetail?campaignid=11111111111&adgroupid=2222222222&keyword=jeans&device=m

Tips For Setting Up Your Google Ads Tracking Template

The first thing you need to do is decide on a tracking template that works best for you. Here are some tips:

• Your ads and landing pages should be properly set up with Google Analytics so that you can see how many people are visiting and clicking through to your site.
• Use the same tracking code on all of your ads and landing pages, so that you can get consistent results and make accurate reports in Google Analytics.
• Ensure all of your links are pointing to the proper landing page or ad in Google Ads.
• Make sure all the tracking variables are set up correctly so that you can track conversions from all of your campaigns, not just one campaign or one ad group as part of an ad group campaign (which may be better for some businesses).

Smart Tool to Track PPC Campaigns’ Performance With Ease

The purpose of tracking templates is to track your essential PPC metrics. Since most of your marketing budget goes toward these ads, it’s crucial to manage and optimize them. Getting the results you want is also important, especially when you are running multiple campaigns simultaneously. But there are other metrics which are needed to be tracked and monitored very closely so that your campaigns keep on giving you good results. The data from your PPC campaign can be easily managed with a tool like PPC Signal. This can alert you to any potential problems before they drain your entire budget.

Let’s say you are running an online business campaign, and you want to optimize your conversions. You can get an automated generated signal telling you how well your conversions are doing. Navigate to the PPC Signal’s dashboard and select metrics and then click on the conversion. Additionally, you can explore the signal for more information.

On clicking the explore button, you can see the graphical data of your campaign, which helps you understand how long your conversions have been declining.

Also, you can view the data in tabular form to see how other campaign metrics affect your conversions.

You can use these signals to check the performance of your conversions and see if they are declining and if other campaign metrics are impacting them. In turn, this allows you to accomplish more with less effort.

These insights allow you to take action faster to prevent your campaign budget from being slashed. With this tool, you can gain actionable insights from your data and improve your PPC campaign faster, thus increasing your sales.

FAQs:

Why do you recommend adding the tracking template at the campaign level?

You should set your templates at the campaign level since different types of campaigns may have different ValueTrack parameters (such as video ads versus search ads or shopping ads). For the same level of session data for your customers, you can use this tracking template at the account level even if you’re not running different types of campaigns. Tracking templates can be set up at the account level so that every campaign is tracked exactly the same way.

If I set my tracking template at the account, ad group, ad, or visitor level, how does that impact my tracking template?

Different tracking templates can be set at different levels, but the most specific template will be used at each level.

Is Google’s parallel tracking impacted by using tracking templates?

When you use your own tracking template, Google’s parallel tracking is not impacted.

However, if you’re using a third-party tracker, it is possible that the tracker will have its own tracking template and that this could affect parallel tracking.

If I’ve turned on auto-tagging in Google Ads, do I still need to add a tracking template to our final URLs?

Yes, of course. The auto-tagging feature only allows you to track the Google click ID (GCLID) for Google Ads conversion tracking. To receive campaign and keyword data in your reports, you need to add a tracking template to your Google Ads account.

Does updating a final URL cause a loss of ad history?

You will only lose ad history if you change your tracking parameters at the ad level. Account, campaign, and ad group level tracking parameter updates won’t trigger a review. Therefore, the stats for your campaigns will remain intact and will not need to go through a review.

Wrap Up:

As soon as you’ve setup the Google Ads tracking template, you should test it. Simply click the test button below the input field to do so. Additionally, you’ll probably want to click your own ads. In this case, you are confirming that the tracking template works and is capturing data from the user.

You don’t want the Google Ads tracking template to break your campaign or not collect all that valuable information. Follow the setup of your ads, you can analyze all clicks to determine how you can improve your targeting options and increase returns on investment. Several factors should be kept in mind, including the location, the device, the browser etc. You’ll be amazed at how quickly your ad campaigns can be transformed if you act upon the data you’ve collected.