Using + in Adwords URL

[YNWA]

Hi.

I am using keywords in my Destination URL in Adwords. So http://example.com/?football+boots+supplier

This was done by someone else and I am trying to understand the full meaning behind this. If I go to the page it links to, it is just the homepage of the website but obviously shows up in Analytics as a landing page that stills out from the general landing page of homepage /

Is that the reason so its easier to track the data? I would have though using the Paid referral in Analytics does this better?

Any help be great. Thanks

[Hutch42]

They could be using it to track what keywords are being used, it is a poor choice as linking GA to Adwords is a better option, or using {keyword} to get the actual keyword used instead of hard coding in each and every url from Adwords. They might have a system in place that needs that, but from both a toll perspective and and SEO perspective there is no beneficial reason to do that in my opinion.

[JasmineA]

Unless there's something on your back end that is picking up this data, there's absolutely no reason to have this on the end of your urls. Just make sure that your auto tagging is on on both Analytics and AdWords. It's much easier to track your accounts if you let AdWords & Analytics communicate with the features that have already been created.

Typical URL tagging structures are:: .com?utm_campaign=football&utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc

If you have any additional Business Intelligence team pulling information from the URL, you should discuss with them what they would like to see, but it's typically not necessary.

[stevefidelity]

Just building on Jasmine's comment, the Google Analytics URL builder is a handy tool to created tagged URLs easily. It particularly makes it easy if you want to name a campaign something like 'Campaign #1'. You can't write '?utm_campaign=Campaign #1 in the URL. If you just fill out the fields in the URL builder, it automatically builds the proper URL for you, i.e., utm_campaign=Campaign%20%231

%20 = 'space'

%23 = #

In short, don't stress about why that particular URL is constructed the way that it is. It doesn't follow best practices. There's better ways of building/tagging URLs.

[JasmineA]

Thanks Steve! Yes, I totally agree.

There are so many options out there for tagging and tracking. Personally, I prefer to leave it up to Google unless I'm tracking the information elsewhere (of course unless you're working with Bing, then you definitely need it!). Steve, do you tag all of your URLs even when they just go directly to GA from AdWords? When would you recommend using any manually tagged parameters?

Thanks for chiming in!!