Google Ads Custom Parameters

Key Takeaways

not long ago we talked about Facebook's dynamic URL tracking and how it can make tagging your URLs in facebook so much easier than manually tagging all those different URLs in that video I reference how Google Ads has a number of different options for dynamic tracking and today I want to dive into that a little bit more and how we can use custom parameters to get even more customized than what they already have in the system let's jump in in the Google ads Help section they give you a rundown of all of the available value track parameters that you can use in your tracking templates to dynamically insert information about your campaign ad all that good stuff there's quite a list here everything from campaign an ad group ID down to match type network device Google click ID creative keyword all sorts of things a couple that I want to focus on are the campaign and AD group ID these are customized numbers to be able to know which specific campaign and which specific ad group a user came from the only problem is without doing some sort of vlookup or reverse engineering the numbers within the system it's hard to know exactly which campaign and AD group they came from at a glance so I want to talk through how we can set up some custom parameters at the campaign and AD group level to make that just a little bit easier so let's hop into the Google Ads interface within our search campaign if we want to set up a custom parameter at the campaign level we'll need to head into the Settings tab within the Settings tab click on the additional settings link down here at the bottom it'll expand a little bit and we need to go into the campaign URL options here you'll see the space for the tracking template if you set those at a campaign level this is where you would normally add those but then a little bit further down you'll see custom parameters this is what I want to talk about instead of using campaign ID it's a little bit easier for me at least to use the actual campaign name within my tracking parameters but that's not a dynamic option so if I were going to do that I would have to set that manually in the tracking template would look something like this I added just search to keep as a placeholder you can see I'd have to manually tag each of the campaigns that we have within an account to make sure that the campaign name matched within the tracking template so what I would like to do instead is actually create my own custom parameter so that I don't have to manually tag every single campaign so instead let's take off search and then create our own custom parameter you'll notice down here that just inside the open squiggly brace there's a little underscore this is what helps Google understand that this is a custom parameter and is different from one of the preset value track parameters so in here you would give it a name since I want it to be campaign name I'm just going to make it campaign then for this campaign the name is search so that would be the value if you had other campaigns that were named search - shoes you would add the - shoes on the end of this one but this campaign will just be named search for now so we'll leave it this way this is taking the place of the manual tagging that we would have done in the tracking template up here and basically moving it down here we can then use the custom parameter to create a dynamic field within the tracking template to pre-populate that campaign name that we just created in the tracking template the best part about this is that now that this is set up this way with UTM campaign equals underscore campaign I actually don't have to have campaign level tracking templates I could copy and paste this whole thing and add it at the account level and as long as all of my campaigns have these custom parameters set using the campaign custom parameter name and the appropriate value for the campaign name after that all of it will dynamically append into the URL when a user clicks my ad these can then be used at a number of different levels we just talked about campaigns the same thing applies for ad groups if you go into any ad group that you have click settings there's the ad group URL options and then you have the same builder that you do at the campaign level so here to know what the actual ad group name is so we can create our own custom parameter with the name of ad group and then create the value to reflect the ad group name you can customize these however you need if you want to put a space in this you want the ad and group to be separate you can either add percent twenty or a plus and that will ensure that you don't have any spaces that would potentially break the URL but it will also then actually populate a space within the URL and within Google Analytics or any other tracking system that you're using so that would look something like this custom parameters can also be set up at the ad level when you go to create an ad you can scroll down and see the ad URL options pretty much all the same fields will apply here so anything that you want to be here if you want to try and name the ad based on the headline you can do that you can create a headline field and then pre populate what you're using as your headline in the value of the parameter you can also set up custom parameters at the keyword level the only part that's a little bit different for keywords is that you'll notice when I go to create a new keyword you can't actually add any custom parameters within this builder so what we need to do is add all of your keywords and then we can append the custom parameters to it later so maybe we want to come in here and hit edit and then change custom parameters here we can add parameters set parameters for a number of different keywords we can remove do a find and replace which is pretty cool or append text to parameters that are already there so let's say we want to understand what type of keyword we have so maybe we create our own piece that says keyword type and for this keyword maybe it's a brand keyword so we name it brand but if we have other keywords in the account that are non brand or product specific we can then name them with those values but keep the keyword type so they'll all report in the same area and we can compare brand vers non brand product-specific all of those in a single report within Google Analytics or any other platform that you're using custom parameters will allow you to track basically anything within your URLs as long as you set everything up make sure everything stays clean and always apply values to any of the levels you want whether it's campaign ad group ad or keyword it might take a little bit more setup in the front end but it will allow you to use just one either account level or maybe a higher campaign level tracking template rather than having to adjust it for every level within your account and making sure that you're not missing something by overriding one layer versus the other thanks for watching our video make sure to subscribe to the paid media pros channel just more videos [Music]