John over at PPC Hero reports an experience he had with 301 redirects. This is a lesson worth telling and retelling simply because the Google AdWords Help Center tells you point blank that what John experienced will happen.
Specifically, here’s what happened. John paid for an ad and pointed to Page A as his destination URL. Page A has a 301 redirect to Page B. When John looks at his Google Analytics to see what traffic he is getting from his paid search campaign all of those clicks are registered as organic search traffic. Is that a problem?
Yes, it’s a huge problem if you want accurate tracking and reporting. This seems to be a glitch in the communication practices between Google AdWords pay per click and Google Analytics. And I haven’t seen anything from Google AdWords that says they intend to fix this issue any time soon. I think it’s safe to say that you should not use pages with 301 redirects as your destination URLs unless you don’t care about tracking that traffic.
Nick,
Thanks for the hat tip. I live and breath PPC, and to be perfectly honest, I had never run into this before. But lesson learned! I’m now cleaning up reporting for the month+ I’ve been working on the account, plus the months preceding my involvement. Messy, messy, messy. So YES, only play with 301 redirects and PPC if you don’t care about accurate traffic!
- John, PPC Hero
Hi Guys,
This is great information. I’ve researched in the past on this topic to little avail. In any case, do you know if using 301 redirects will also interfere with Adwords Conversion Tracking, or are we dealing only with Analytics here?
Some of our ads include www. in the destination URL, some don’t. For SEO purposes, we’re talking about using a 301 redirect to make non-www. URLs always resolve to the www. version. As head of PPC, I want to make sure we don’t screw up our conversion tracking, etc.
Any info you guys could provide would be awesome. Thanks so much!
Taylor, why would you want to track conversions and not track CTR or get accurate traffic numbers? You can’t get an accurate measure of ROI if you don’t know how many conversions you are getting versus click-throughs. I’d stay away from 301 redirects unless you don’t care about tracking numbers at all.
Pay per click management is all about conversions. Collecting traffic statistics is great but if they don’t convert would good is the campaign. Manage your campaign on conversions and sometimes less traffic can be much better.