Tracking templates are a way to collect more information about your ads clicks than Google Analytics can offer by itself. This extra data enables you to make better optimisations and maximise the return on your marketing spend. To do this, you’ll need to understand how tracking templates work and how to use them.

A google ads tracking template is essentially a final URL suffix that passes a range of information about the user when it’s clicked (source, device, campaign name, keyword etc). The example below shows how this would be appended to the end of a website address. The first parameter is lpurl which returns the final URL link, followed by a question mark and then the names of the parameters you wish to track down. These parameters can be customised to suit your own requirements and will be replaced with the values they’re given when a click is made.

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The tracking template is installed at the account level in your Google Ads account and can be applied to individual campaigns or all. To test your new template, log into your account and navigate to the “Account settings” – ‘Tracking’ column, and hit ‘Test ad link’.

At Clixtell, we combine the data received from a google ads tracking template with the information collected by our website script to provide over 100 data points for every click. This means that our reporting matches Google Ads click reports by nearly 100% and provides redundancy & reliability in case one method fails.