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What AdWords’ Automatic URL Upgrade Means For You
If you manage your own pay per click campaigns, chances are you’ve probably seen this notification pop up in your AdWords account recently:
According to the warning, starting July 1, 2015, all of your eligible ad destination URLs will automatically be upgraded, but some may need to be changed manually.
What Does the “Upgrade Your Destination URLs” Message from AdWords Mean?
In short, this upgrade is a system-wide change for how you enter the URLs your ads will link to. Originally, there was one field where you put the landing page or “Destination URL.” This year, Google launched upgraded URLs with multiple fields where advertisers can customize what they now call “Final URLs” to better track their marketing.
Previously, you had the option of choosing whether you wanted to use the old or new option, but starting July 1st, only the new option will be available.
While Google’s “Learn More” link takes you to an informative, but lengthy and technical article about how to upgrade for different situations, it doesn’t do a great job of making it clear how this change affects you—something I hope to take care of in this post.
How Does AdWords’ Destination URL Upgrade Affect You?
The first step in determining this is to take a look at the Destination URLs in your ads.
This is the web address someone will go to when they click on your ad.
If Your Destination URL Doesn’t Have a Question Mark…
If your Destination URL is just a page on your website and doesn’t have a question mark with a bunch of stuff after it, this probably means you aren’t doing any additional tracking or you have AdWords auto-tagging setup to automatically pass information to Google Analytics or whatever analytics platform you are using. In this case, just let the automatic upgrade happen, your Destination URLs will now be called “Final URLs” and nothing will change for your account.
If Your Destination URL Has a Question Mark…
If your Destination URL has a question mark with a bunch of stuff after it, it means you’ve set up additional tracking to better measure your marketing efforts and you may need to take additional action to ensure your tracking and ads are running properly.
If You Use Tracking within One Domain:
If you use tracking within one domain, you don’t need to take action, but you still may want to. By tracking within one domain, I mean that the Destination/Final URL has the same domain of the custom “Display URL” shown in your ad. This applies to the large majority of advertisers using tracking.
If this describes your setup, the upgrade will also just change the label of the URLs to Final URLs, and they will work the same.
However, you should still take advantage of the new features available in this upgrade because of how much easier it makes editing your tracking, which I describe below. And if you ever need to adopt more advanced tracking as your company grows, it will save you a lot of time to setup this framework now while your URLs are simpler.
If You Use a Third Party Tracking Domain:
If you use a third party service that sends ad clicks to another domain for tracking and then redirects back to a landing page on your website, you absolutely need to take action. With this upgrade, Google now requires the domain of the Display URL to match the Final URL. If it does not, your ad will be disapproved and will not run. You can still use these tracking services and redirects, but you will need to set up the new tracking templates, which I show later in this post.
Why Is This New URL Format Better?
“… we are introducing Upgraded URLs to provide an easier and faster way to manage and track important information about each click on your AdWords ads.”
That quote from Google does a good job of summarizing the answer to the question. Going into detail, previously if you needed to change or add a tracking variable, you would have to edit each ad individually. You could do this with bulk edits, but the new format makes that process much cleaner by allowing you to make these changes in one place, and you can do so at the account, campaign, or ad group levels.
Also any time you edit an ad, Google views that as creating a brand new ad and removing the old one, which means your new ad has to be reviewed and the data from the old ad is hidden. If you just need to change tracking parameters, you can now do so without having to create a new ad.
How to Set Up a Tracking Template and Parameters
Let’s run through an example of how to set up a new Tracking Template with Custom Parameters. As I mentioned, you can do this at the account, campaign, and ad group levels, or for individual ads and keywords. Whatever you set at the smallest level will take precedent, so a tracking template for an ad group will override the campaign’s template.
To set up a Tracking Template, find the “URL Options” for your desired level. For ads, they appear when you edit or create an ad. For ad groups, you have to customize columns in the ad group table to show the tracking template and custom parameter columns. For campaigns, the URL options are under Settings. And for the account, they are in the Shared Library.
This screenshot is at the ad level. The options look similar at every level, except that you can’t set custom parameters at the account level.
The Final URL is set for each ad; it is the page that users will end up on and it needs to have the same domain as the Display URL. The tracking template and parameters define where the initial ad click will go and what information will be passed. The example Google gives (http://www.trackingc.com/?url={lpurl}&id=5) will send clicks to the third-party domain trackingc.com to track the ‘id’ value of 5 and then redirect to the landing page url (lpurl). The brackets means that the value changes depending on the situation.
{lpurl} is one of Google’s preset ValueTrack parameters, which allow you to pass a variety of information. You can also set Custom Parameters to track information that you define. They are visibly different from ValueTrack parameters in that they start with an underscore.
In our example, we show how to set up a template and parameters within the same domain. We want a click on this ad to go to https://www.bluecorona.com?_vsrefdom=gpbr so we set the Final URL as www.bluecorona.com and define the tracking template as the Final URL plus the variable ‘vsrefdom‘ which has the value of ‘gpbr’ defined by our parameter ‘{_calltag}.’ You can create tracking templates at higher levels, like campaigns and ad groups, and define custom parameters for specific ads and keywords.
To test that the URL is working correctly, hover over the speech bubble next to the result; it displays in detail the template, parameters, and URL used.
For more detailed instructions, check out Google’s guide.
TL; DR
On July 1st, Google is switching all Destination URLs in AdWords to the new Final URL format to a make it easier for advertisers to manage advanced tracking. To determine how this affects you, refer to our handy chart below:
If your Destination URLs look like this, |
Do this: |
---|---|
http://www.yoursite.com/landingpage |
|
http://www.yoursite.com/landingpage?id=3&ad={creative} |
|
http://www.othertrackingsite.com/page?id=3&ad={creative}&url=http %3A%2F%2Fwww.yoursite.com%2Flandingpage |
|
Make sure to figure out how your AdWords ads are setup right away so you can make any necessary changes to ensure they keep running come July 1st. If you need help determining this, transitioning your URLs, or would like to learn about how you can better track your ad spend, call Blue Corona today.
About The Author: Spencer is a PPC Specialist at Blue Corona. His favorite activities are cooking and making spreadsheets.
View more blogs by Spencer Chang
The information on this website is for informational purposes only; it is deemed accurate but not guaranteed. It does not constitute professional advice. All information is subject to change at any time without notice. Contact us for complete details.
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