Obtaining campaign query string parameters from Google adwords

Question

As I understand Google Adwords, you can either setup the click thru URLs to be auto tagged (returns just &glcid=XXXXXXX in the querystring), or you can do this manually (returns &utm-source=MyCampaign etc).

I wish to customise the onpage content to show something relevant to the adwords query. For example, if the current campaign is targeting 'Nurses' then one of the featured items on the homepage will be about Nursing.

With manual tagging I can grab part of the querystring and conditionally show something, but with auto tagging, I'm unable to grab anything useable as it's no doubt timestamped and just refers back to an adwords campaign id. Is there anything in the cookie that gets set?

1) Is there any way to get something useable out of the auto tagged URL with regards to the campaign the click has come from?

2) If I use manual tagging, does it affect the additional data that gets assigned to analytics such as query string matching, keyword position etc. Does this also affect ad distribution network data?

Many thanks

Pete

Answer 1

I would recommend that you stick with Auto Tagging so that you can see the correct data in Analytics (query string matching, campaign, ad postition etc etc). There shouldn't be any reason why you can't use Auto Tagging in combination with AdWords Value Track. So with Auto Tagging on something like this:

http://www.example.com/?keyword={keyword}

Should results in the following:

http://www.example.com/?keyword=Nurses&gclid=DL-M4dGbscMCF2fkwtodrLRATA

That way you should be able to get the best of both worlds : accurate data in Analytics due to Auto Tagging and the ability to parse out the keyword=parameter from the incoming URL in order to show content relevant to the matched keyword in Adwords. Granted you will get the matched keyword as opposed to the exact search query that was entered but (hopefully) it will be sufficient!