2021-02-19
Making Life Easier with Tracking Templates
Tracking your campaigns is critically important to understanding and documenting the success of your paid search management. However, it can become challenging to manage URL tags and other individual tracking identifiers at scale. Tracking templates can help you cut through all of the noise and make your life easier. Here we take a closer look at what tracking templates are and how to use them in your account.
Watch our video below or read on to learn more about how you can make your life easier with tracking templates.
URL Parameters and Tracking
Before diving into tracking templates, it is essential you first have a basic understanding of URL parameters. Google Ads has an auto-tagging feature that enables Google Ads and Google Analytics to share information and recognize your traffic. If you are using any other types of tracking systems — whether they are other analytics tools or even internally-built tools — you will need to be comfortable using URL parameters.
WHAT ARE URL PARAMETERS?
A URL parameter is a key-value pair that appears after the question mark of a URL. Here is an example:
This example begins with a landing page URL. Then you will see the question mark with a URL parameter called utm_source. This URL parameter is set equal to the value of Google.
You might see some links with multiple URL parameters all chained together and separated by an ampersand. These URL parameters help analytics tools understand where your traffic is coming from. They subsequently use this tracked data to help you measure the effectiveness of your campaigns.
In this example, we saw the basic use of a UTM source parameter—but you might use other UTM parameters like utm_medium, utm_campaign, or a set of custom parameters built for other analytics systems.
THE CHALLENGE OF USING URL PARAMETERS
The primary challenge when executing URL parameters in your account is managing this effort at scale. If you have a thousand different keyword targets, you will not want to individually customize your tags and URL parameters for each keyword target.
This is where tracking templates come in. So what are tracking templates, and do you use them in the Google Ads interface?
Tracking Templates in Google Ads
The best place to learn about tracking templates is often straight from the source. Google Ads Help