If it finds any error or ambiguity, it sends you a notification alert so that you can fix the issue. One such notification is ‘Destination URLs Not Tagged’:
You get the ‘Destination URLs Not Tagged’ notification whenever there is a significant clicks and sessions discrepancy i.e. your Google Ads account has recorded a significant number of ad clicks but a lower than expected number of GA sessions.
#2 The destination URLs (i.e. the landing pages of Google Ads) do not have Google Analytics tracking code or the tracking code is not valid or the tracking code is valid but is not firing for some reason (i.e. missing tracking code):
#3 Your Google Analytics account is not linked to your Google Ads account.
#4 You have not tagged the destination URLs of your Google Ads.
How to fix ‘Destination URLs Not Tagged’ Google Analytics notification
Follow the steps below:
Step-1: Make sure all the destination URLs (i.e. the landing pages of your Google Ads) have Google Analytics tracking code installed and this code fires on page load. You can use Google Analytics debugger for this purpose.
Sometimes when you have new functionality to deploy on the website, the dev team forgets about adding the GA tracking code and publishes the website to production.
So then whenever the user lands on your website after clicking one of your Google Ads, an ad click is recorded but not the corresponding GA session. Over time this issue creates a significant clicks and session discrepancy.
Step-2: Make sure all the destination URLs of your Google Ads have Google Analytics tracking code that matches with the Google Analytics tracking code installed on the rest of your website.
When you deploy the Google Analytics tracking code or Google Tag Manager Container code in any way other than the one recommended by Google, your GA/GTM implementation no longer remains a standard implementation.
Following are examples of non-standard implementation of Google Analytics:
Tracking code placed outside the head section (<head> …</head>) of a web page.
Tracking code contains invalid formatting (extra comma, extra whitespaces, bracket, or semicolon)
Tracking code contains invalid casing (GA function names are case sensitive)
Tracking code deployed via a third-party plugin.
Make sure you use the only standard methods to implement Google Analytics on the website. There are only two recommended ways to install Google Analytics on a website:
By using a tag management solution like Google Tag Manager.
If your Google Analytics tracking code is not working as expected on your website then it is most likely due to the non-standard GA/GTM implementation.
Step-4: Make sure that your Google Analytics property and Google Ads account are linked together.
Google recommends that you use auto-tagging instead of manual tagging to tag the URLs of the landing pages of your Google Ads.
If the manual tagging of destination URLs is not correct then Google Analytics may choose to ignore the campaign tracking variables and treat Google Ads traffic as Google organic traffic. This could result in a lot of discrepancies between Google Ads clicks and GA sessions.
The solution to this problem is to avoid using manual tagging and instead enable the auto-tagging feature of Google Ads.
Follow the steps below to enable the auto-tagging feature in Google Ads:
Step-1: Sign in to your Google Ads Account.
Step-2: Click on ‘Settings’ from the menu on the left-hand side.
Step-3: Click on ‘Account Settings’:
You should now see a screen like the one below:
Step-4: Click on ‘Auto-tagging’:
Step-5: Click on the checkbox next to ‘Tag the URL that people click through from my ad’
This will allow the automatic addition of a GCLID parameter to your URL.
Step-6: Click on ‘Save’.
Once you saved the configuration you will see the auto-tagging status as ‘Yes’:
That’s how you can enable auto-tagging in Google Ads.
When the auto-tagging is enabled, a parameter called ‘GCLID’ (Google Click Identifier) is automatically added to the URLs of the landing pages of your Google Ads. This ‘GCLID’ parameter then gets stored in a new Google Analytics cookie for tracking website conversion.
GCLID tracks the following parameters by default.
Query match type.
Ad group.
Final URL
Ad Format
Ad Distribution Network
Placement domain
Google Ads customer ID
Hour of the day the URL was clicked.
Placements
Keyword Positions
Display targeting
Video campaigns
Shopping campaigns
Note(1): The auto-tagging is not enabled by default in Google Ads settings.
Note(2): Avoid using both manual and auto-tagging at the same time. If you are using auto-tagging, make sure that no URL is manually tagged. Otherwise, this could create serious data discrepancy issues between Google Ads and Google Analytics.
Other Articles on Google Analytics Notifications and alerts
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