I must admit I was a bit suprised that matomo is tracking traffic from Google Ads as “organic” by default. According to this blog-post:
it seems that the only way to do this is to either change all of your ads (add tracking-parameters) or to buy the “Advertising Conversion Export”-Plugin.
I was wondering if there isn’t an easy way to just tell matomo to track all traffic from Google with a gclid in an own campaign. I know that this has some disadvantages (like not knowing which ad exactly was hit or which one converted, no feedback to Google Ads etc), but for some of the smaller sites I look after that would be enough. Is there a setting or a small plugin which does this?
Thanks for your reply. The problem is that it seems you have to change the template for every ad group which sometimes is a lot of work and might break other analytics solutions (which are used at least for some time simultaneously to Matomo).
Wouldn’t it be possible to tell matomo that everything with a gclid is from Google Ads?
Unfortunately yes, you will have to change all ad groups to persist the campaign name.
There’s no good way to do this if you want to persist the campaign name etc. If you just want campaign IDs, you can just add it to the account-wide tracking template:
This would basically provide you with the same setup. Only difference is that it’ll be Campaign IDs from Ads and not campaign names.
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