Paid Search Visits Not Showing Up in Google Analytics

[danny.wood]

Hey all,

Just took over SEM for my company, and noticed a bit of a problem with GA. Whereas Adwords has registered 141 clicks on paid campaigns that go to the site, GA has tracked only 5 vists in that time.

Two things of note: The GA account was not linked to the Adwords account until today, and also, auto-tagging was not turned on. I understand these two things are important to having proper GA tracking, but I just want to make sure that there aren't any other things I should check right now to make sure I start to see tracked paid visits again. Is there anything else I should try?

Cheers.

[danny.wood]

Thanks Adam! Luckily the campaigns weren't built out that extensively yet, so I didn't get hit too badly with a drop in organic. But I'll definitely factor that into reporting nonetheless.

[AdamWormann]

Just as a heads up - it is likely that if this was the issue, these keywords were being tracked as organic searches.  Check to see if your organic traffic suddenly drops.  If so, it's likely that your traffic isn't really dropping, it's just being measured separately (properly) now.

I've had that happen, and it's frustrating.

[danny.wood]

Yup I think you're right, there're no extra redirects, and getting autotagging turned back on has produced paid traffic in GA almost immediately. Thank for confirmation!

[Schwaab]

If auto-tagging wasn't turned on, were the campaign URLs manually tagged?  Did they have utm parameters on them?

It is most likely a case of not having any campaign tags on the destination URLs.

I'm working on a site where dynamic URL extensions to the homepage were automatically redirecting to the regular homepage URL.  Though autotagging was turned on in Adwords, the campaign tags were being lost in the redirects meaning that the paid visits were not being tracked properly in Google Analytics.  They were being recorded as organic visits.

Double check that the destination URLs of the PPC campaigns are not redirecting, and that any autotagged URL will not redirect.