Here’s a very simple, very clever fix to an auto-tagging issue in AdWords.

You may be having issues implementing the auto-tagging, depending on how your site is built. I came across a client recently that had some custom redirects on their site that was interfering with the auto-tagging and outputting 404s.

The following examples, as outputted by AdWords when the campaign tracking is live, were not working:

example.com/?gclid=1234
example.com/index.php?gclid=1234
example.com/page/?gclid=1234

However, a typical query string did work on this particular site. As you probably know, you can only have one query string in a URL. If there is already a query string in the destination URL of your ad, AdWords will append their tracking with an ampersand. Nice one Google!

The solution: fake a query string!

Try this destination URL:

example.com/?adwords

If it works, turn on auto-tagging and, once an ad is clicked, the appended URL will be:

example.com/?adwords&gclid=1234

Problems: duplicate reporting

You’ll be able to analyse all of your AdWords traffic in the individual analytics tab, however using the ?adwords query string will result in a second set of page views. For example, in your page views (from all sources), you will see results for:

example.com and example.com/?adwords

There’s no way around this, that I can see, but it is a fair compromise to be able to use auto-tagging.

The alternative: dynamic tagging

There’s a great post on how to manually tag ads with dynamic values. If the above doesn’t work for you, the dynamic values on this page will – however, it can still take a lot of time with large campaigns.

Please let me know your feedback or questions!