How to tidy up Google Ads' final URL suffix?

General questions
1

Hi all,
I’ve just started using Matomo having been a GA user.

We run Google Ads which has final URL suffixes after all ad clicks. These come after the gclid string which is hidden, but the final URL suffix comes through to Matomo creating it as a separate page.
E.g. I have two versions of a page:

/page
/page?campaignid=123adgroupid=321 etc.

Is there a good way of cleaning these up? Or hiding them without hiding the data?

In Universal Analytics I had a separate View which merged URL parameters with the original URL. Is there anything like that I can do in Matomo? Just wondering what is best practice.

Thanks!

2

How do you track? (MTM? GTM? javascript tracking? other?)
If I understand you just want to remove adgroupid=321 from /page?campaignid=123adgroupid=321?
Note that there is some configuration in the Matomo site definition:

image
image1300×1201 29.5 KB

3

This is all after the gclid (Google Ads). The gclid string doesn’t appear but what I have in the final URL suffix shows. However I don’t want to ‘exclude’ this traffic (as then I wouldn’t be able to track any Google Ads traffic), but rather merge it by removing the final url suffix (which starts with campaignid= and has lots of different things.

4

Hi @khanson
The screenshot I provided allows removing some parameters from URLs being tracked.
If you add some values in Excluded Parameters field (eg. foo), then the page where selected parameter will still be tracked, but the selected parameter will be removed from URL.
index.html?foofoo=barbar → index.html?foofoo=barbar
index.html?foo=bar → index.html
index.html?foo=bar&bar=foo → index.html?bar=foo

5

To check…

I have lots of landing page URLs, a lot have the Google Ads URL suffix such as this:

https://www.mywebsite.com/en?campaignid=1071215502&adgroupid=53270491099&creative=314112868299&keyword=the%20keyword&matchtype=b&network=g&device=c

If I add campaignid to the excluded parameters? Will it exclude everything? (As ?campaignid= is always at the start)? And when I say exclude, I mean ‘merge’, will it merge all the data into the plain URL that is:https://www.mywebsite.com/en

I want to make sure I can tidy up all the URLs but make sure that Matomo is able to sort URLs into their correct places still

6

You can add all parameters that are set by Google Ads in the field on several lines…:

campaignid
adgroupid
creative
keyword
matchtype
network
device

Note that gclid, fbclid, fb_xd_fragment, fb_comment_id, phpsessid, jsessionid, sessionid, aspsessionid, doing_wp_cron, sid and pk_vid are already excluded by default…