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Cody_Haener
Cody_Haener
New Participant
January 4, 2017
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Using 'gclid' with UTM Values

  • January 4, 2017
  • 1 reply
  • 4830 views

Hi everyone,

I’m curious how others who are using Google’s autotagging feature are tracking their AdWords campaigns in Marketo. Will adding UTM variables to an autotagged URL causes any issues in Google Analytics since the URL would also have the ‘gclid’ value?

I’d like to continue to use autotagging since it gives us more data in Google Analytics, but I also have javascript running on our site that saves the UTM values as a cookie when someone visits our site for attribution within Marketo. By just using URLs with 'gclid' values, I'm not able to attribute leads to specific AdWord ads or campaigns in Marketo. I’m concerned that using a combination of the ‘gclid’ and UTM values could result in duplicate data in Google Analytics.

How is everyone else handling this?

Thanks!

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Best answer by SanfordWhiteman

The question should probably be over in the Products space.

Anyway, you don't have to worry about duplicate data. The autotagged metadata (pointed to by the `gclid` param) will override UTM info on the Google side by default (there's a setting to switch the priority, but you don't want that).

But there's also no reason to use param names starting with "utm_" outside of GA. They have no magic meaning and you could use your own naming convention to completely eliminate confusion.

1 reply

SanfordWhiteman
SanfordWhitemanAccepted solution
New Participant
January 4, 2017

The question should probably be over in the Products space.

Anyway, you don't have to worry about duplicate data. The autotagged metadata (pointed to by the `gclid` param) will override UTM info on the Google side by default (there's a setting to switch the priority, but you don't want that).

But there's also no reason to use param names starting with "utm_" outside of GA. They have no magic meaning and you could use your own naming convention to completely eliminate confusion.

Cody_Haener
Cody_HaenerAuthor
New Participant
January 4, 2017

Hi Stanford,

Thanks for confirming that this won't cause any issues in GA. I haven't considered using a completely different parameter name instead of 'utm'. I may need to play around with that.

Also - I moved this thread to the Product space.

Thanks!

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