URL management just got easier
Constant connectivity has increased the ways that people engage with your business, meaning more data and metrics for you to use to manage ad performance. That’s why 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*.
Upgraded URLs offer several benefits for advertisers, including:
- less time spent managing URL tracking updates
- reduced crawl and load times on your website
- new ValueTrack parameters that help you gain additional insights about your ads. Learn more.
Johannes Lipka, Product & Solution Manager at eProfessional GmbH, says:
“Upgraded URLs have been one of the most time-saving tools we’ve used in AdWords. It’s allowed us to change custom tracking parameters for a group of URLs all in one place, without re-setting ad stats. We plan to upgrade our clients’ accounts over to Upgraded URLs as soon as possible.”
Destination URLs today
If you use URL tracking today, you’ll notice that
Destination URLs are made up of two components:
- Landing page URL This is the URL that customers see in their browsers when they get to your landing page after clicking on your ad.
- Tracking This section includes information like redirects to third party tracking services, ValueTrack parameters, or custom creative IDs.
In the example below,
blue represents the landing page, and
green represents the tracking information.
www.example.com?creative=12345
With destination URLs, anytime you need to adjust tracking, you have to update the entire destination URL. This triggers a re-review of your entire destination URL and your ads stop running while your URL is re-reviewed -- causing you to lose time and potential new business.
What’s changing with Upgraded URLs
Upgraded URLs let you enter the landing page portion of your URL and your tracking information separately in AdWords. Now you have the option to update your tracking information at your account, campaign or ad group without having to re-set your ad stats.
Let’s see how the example URL above could be constructed using the new upgraded URL fields.
Final URL is where you’ll enter your website’s landing page URL.
 |
| The landing page 'www.example.com' is now entered in the Final URL Field |
Tracking templates are where you enter your tracking information and tell AdWords how to assemble your URLs. Now, if you’d like to scale your tracking updates across multiple URLs, you can use a shared
tracking template at the account, campaign or ad group level. If you’d prefer to manage your URL tracking information at the individual URL level, you can use a
tracking template at the ad, keyword, or sitelink level.
In the example below, we’ve used a tracking template at the account level to apply our tracking information across all of the URLs in the account.
 |
| Tracking information for all URLs in the account is placed in the account level tracking template |
|
Custom parameters let you customize the information you’d like to monitor as well as the specific values that get inserted into your URLs when your ad clicks are triggered. For example, if you’d like to insert the value 12345 whenever this specific ad is clicked, you can set the
custom parameter {_mycreative} in this ad.
 |
| Enter '_mycreative' in the custom parameter field to insert 12345 whenever that ad is clicked |
New URLs, new insights
As part of this upgrade, you’ll gain access to many new insights about your ad clicks.
New ValueTrack parameters let you track additional insights about your business. For example, if you’d like to track how many ad clicks were triggered for your creative by location, you can use the new {loc_physical_ms} ValueTrack parameter. To optimally use the new ValueTrack parameters, you can set them up at the account level so you can track these values across all the URLs in your account.
Learn about the new value track parameters.
 |
| The valuetrack for location {location_physical_ms} is in green in the account level tracking template |
|
Next steps
We’ll be rolling out Upgraded URLs to all advertisers starting this week. We encourage all advertisers who use tracking in their URLs to upgrade to the new system by July 1, 2015. Starting on that date, your URLs will begin updating to the new structure.
If you're using a tracking platform to manage your URLs, we encourage working with them to manage these changes.
To learn how you can start using Upgraded URLs for your new ad URLs, please see our article on
Help Center.
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Posted by Leo Sei, Product Manager, Google AdWords
*Everywhere we say ads, we also mean other targeting options available for the Search Network, Display Network, and Shopping.
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