Have you ever experienced a call transfer from one department to another while you were calling to troubleshoot a problem in your machine or report a credit card fraud?
This annoying experience is similar to what we experience in web analytics when we deal with URL redirects. You request one URL and end up at another! Misconfigured URL redirects can cause data loss such as not seeing any data from one or more sources in your web analytics reports
It is common practice in many sites, especially e-commerce sites, to use redirect pages to track campaign performance. The problem is that the redirect usually removes extra parameters from URLs – parameters which are necessary for proper tracking in Google AdWords and Google Analytics.
In order to identify a visitor as a paid visitor in Google Analytics, AdWords auto-tagging adds a parameter to the end of any AdWords destination URL. This parameter is called gclid.
In a normal situation with no URL redirects, when people click on a paid ad with a destination URL such as
the URL that they are supposed to go to might end up looking like this &gclid=a1b2c3d4e5f6g7h8i9
If there was a poorly configured redirect at this point, the visitor might end up at this URL: *
* Note that the gclid parameter is gone and Google Analytics will consider the click as an organic visit and not as a paid visit.
Suggested solutions to this problem:
The final URL will look like this now: google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_term=e-nor%2Bblog&utm_campaign=blog%2BCampaign
Thank you,
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