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This blog details a workaround for using Google Campaign Manager (CM) (formerly DoubleClick Campaign Manager) click tracking in Google Ads (formerly Adwords) as opposed to using DoubleClick search.
As you may know, DoubleClick Campaign Manager (DCM) is pivotal in connecting ad serving with tracking, reporting and attribution. Google typically suggests using DCM alongside DoubleClick Search, but in some instances you may want to leverage the different features of DCM without needing to use DoubleClick Search. This article is primarily addressing users who want to achieve this.
For this article, we are going to assume you are able to create the click tracker in DCM and you are only looking to find a way to implement it in Adwords. If you need help setting them up you can see this article here (https://support.google.com/dcm/answer/3040965?hl=en) or reach out to your Google Account Manager for assistance.
Once you have your click tracker setup, the next step is to log in to Google Ads and navigate to the tracking template section under Account settings:
Once you are on this page you need to insert your DCM ad tracker to the tracking template section (labelled 1 above). But before you insert your ad tracker, we first need to append the ad tracker URL with ValueTrack Parameter.
The reason we add ValueTrack parameters, in this case, is because we want Google Ads to automatically append the landing page URLs to the ad tracker when someone clicks on your Google ads.
ValueTrack parameters are a set of variables Google Ads uses to track additional information from an ad click and pass it to your tracking platforms. The parameters are predefined and you can learn more about them on this link (https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6305348?hl=en-AU)
The ValueTrack parameter we need in this case is {unescapedlpurl} this parameter returns the final URL, unescaped. It’s important to use the unescaped parameter because we want the final URL to be exactly as we have in our ad’s final URL with any additional values appended to it.
So the final click tracker URL added to the tracking template will look like this:
https://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/trackclk…..?{unescapedlpurl}If you need to add any more tracking parameters to the end of the URL you can add these to the Final URL suffix section as we have done on the above image (see label 2).
And that’s basically all you need to do to set up DCM click trackers directly to Adwords. Would love to hear if anyone has found a different workaround or if you have any questions.
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