Paddy Moogan Blog

Is Google AdWords not tracking some of its traffic?

12th June 2009 · Paddy · 2 Comments »

I actually noticed this many months ago, I spoke to our contact at Google Adwords who said they would pass it onto their engineers to look at.  Months later I am still seeing the problem so I thought I’d put it out there and see if I’m being really silly and overlooking an obvious answer, or if Google really is broken.

As part of any good Adwords campaign, auto-tagging is turned on and linked to a Google Analytics account.  Auto-tagging will tag a unique ID to the end of a URL so that when someone clicks on one of your Ads, the info about that click is passed across into your Analytics account for better analysis.  When switched on, the Ad you click on will lead to a URL like this -

http://www.example.com/?gclid=fggewrtw5t4wywrr34t3twe

However if you click on the “more sponsored links” below the Ads, you will see a page like this -

If you click on one of these links, no tag is added to the link.  Does this mean that they are not being tracked in Analytics at all?  I doubt that a huge amount of people actually choose to search just sponsored links or click on the more sponsored links however surely data is being lost here?

Any ideas anyone?