I'm going to chime in here as the conversation has already started from which I want to reference a few items.

While Sean is correct that there is a redirect on page load, - which is weird & not likely optimal - the redirect isn't causing the UTM parameters to be dropped here.
If you check the Network tab of the debug console of Chrome you'll see the two requests for the URI you listed above. If you click the requested file (in the network tab) & navigate to the 'Headers' tab you will see that Query String Parameters are still there & being passed.
Now let's circle back to the original problem & see if we can't get to the bottom of it!

I checked out the graph you linked and while it does seem that there's an inverse correlation there, I wouldn't assume too quickly that they switched. I would encourage you to dive into the data a little bit more. Specifically:

• I would use Google Search Console's Search Analytics (the actual interface, not the section in Google Analytics) & look to see if the number of clicks around that same time changed much.

• If there is a noticeable change, dive into the keywords & Landing Pages that saw the shift

• If there is not a noticeable change, we can cross an actual organic change off our list.

• I would also look at the change over that period in GA's landing page report. Look to see if there are any pages that saw a gain/loss over the period in question.

• If there is, add a secondary dimension of medium & see where the change lies

• If not, mark it off

• The final door I would check is the changes that were made for remarketing

• What if any changes were made within Google Analytics? Specifically the admin portion, while I'd check all changes you may have made here, I'm specifically curious if you may have added the URL Query Parameters as exclusions?

• Were any tags, tracking codes, etc added during this time & are the implementations correct?

If you dive into these and summarize your findings here, I'll be more than happy to help you further. Though, I have a hunch that the answer is behind one of these doors.

Good luck!
Trenton

Hey Chris,

I'm going to address your concerns in-line as I think that's the best way for me to clear up any confusion here.

"My assumption is that organic ranking of my landing page will be effected by bounce rate. When a shopping campaign sends a user to my page and they bounce, Google will see that as a poor user experience with no engagement. This is caused by the Google shopping campaign choosing irrelevant keywords that I have no control over. Running a shopping campaign causes the analytics data to have significantly higher bounce rates and therefore I would think hurts organic ranking of the page."

Your organic rankings will NOT be affected. User engagement signals from AdWords will affect your AdWords quality scores, but under no circumstances will they affect your organic rankings. Google states this publicly, like this example, "Running a Google AdWords campaign does not help your SEO rankings, despite some myths and claims.". It does not hurt, it does not help. The data sets are completely separate. Yes, in your data you can see them combined if you wish, but Google Organic does not see your Paid Ad Engagement Metrics.
As far as control over your Google Shopping, while Google does sometimes trigger terms that are outside the norm, their matching is generally pretty good. I would encourage you to review the post I linked above and to read other articles about Google Shopping Structures. Your structure is everything for AdWords, but it's especially true for Google Shopping. If you're having trouble with targeting, especially after reviewing the search query report and adding negatives, something is wrong with your setup. Review some posts and see if you find anything that might prove valuable.

"So I am paying Google money to lower my rank because of their bad choice of keywords. Google shopping does not allow me to choose the keywords. And the only way to control this is to use negative keywords as you suggest. In my experience this is also not very effective."

I addressed this a bit above, but I think it's worth reiterating here, your paid ads are not lowering your organic rank under any circumstances. Even if they share a landing page, the paid ads will not affect your organic rankings.

"Here is one example. I have a product with the word "Oxy" in the name. Google shopping sent thousands of impressions for queries related to Oxycodone and Oxycotin drugs. My product is an immune support antioxidant supplement for DOGS! Regardless of negative keywords set with adwords support folks on the phone, they continued to send queries for all sorts of variations. Such as "oxycodone 10mg" "buy oxycodone" ad infinitum! Even setting negative keywords to "broad" didn't help. Eventually tapered off after setting many variations as negative keywords. Close to 50 variations.
So of course these clicks seeking oxycodone immediately bounce when they see it is a product for dogs. My question is does that ultimately hurt my organic ranking?"

This sounds extremely frustrating and I'm sorry to hear that you're having these issues. I'd encourage you to add "Oxycodone" & "Oxycotin" as negative phrase match terms. That should solve your negative targeting issue as described.
But even if these issues still continue to arise, rest assured that your organic rankings will not be affected.

Hope that helps! Let me know if I can be of further assistance.

Best regards,
Trenton

Hey Akira,

In the interest of a fast response, I have to admit I'm not 100% positive on this, that said I believe and my research (1, 2, 3) has supported the below response:

I do not believe that you can use logical operators to setup a step of the goal funnel, but you CAN use RegEx. 
A simple RegEx to help here would be: (page1.html|page2.html). The () are just a grouping & the | is the OR operator.

Hope that helps! Let me know if you have any issues on this. I would recommend testing your solution (make sure you haven't excluded the IP you're on) to ensure it's working properly. You should be able to see it ~2 hours after you complete the test.

Regards,
Trenton

Hey David,

Sorry for the delayed response on this.

Before we get started, I should point out that htaccess's syntax is very particular and you should be extremely careful when messing with it. even a single space out of place can cause massive errors. If you're planning changes, please consult with a developer or three on your team!

I think the best way to explain this is to go through exactly what the htaccess Rewrite calls are doing.

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/(En|Es)$ [NC]

RewriteCond - The condition of which a rewrite will take place
%{REQUEST_URI} - The URI that is requested from the server (everything after the domain and TLD i.e. moz.com/community 's URI would be /community)
^ - Denotes the beginning of a regular expression (regex)
/ - literally just /
(En|Es) - the '()' are simply a grouping and the '|' means OR. So this is saying En OR Es
$ - Denotes the end of a regex
[NC] - Means no case, so everything in this is not case sensitive

So literally this is saying execute this rewrite when the requested URI (after the .com or whatever TLD you use) is either /En OR /Es then whatever, with no attention to case

RewriteRule ^(En|Es)/(.*)$ $2?lang=$1 [L,R=301]

RewriteRule - The executed rule when the aforementioned RewriteCond is met.
^ - Denotes the beginning of a regular expression (regex)
(En|Es) - the '()' are simply a grouping and the '|' means OR. So this is saying En OR Es
/ - literally just /
(.) - This is a wildcard. Once again the () is a grouping, but here the . means zero or more arbitrary characters
$ - Denotes the end of a regex
$2 - this is the second captured grouping in this line. Meaning whatever is defined within (.*), which is everything after En/ or Es/
?lang= - this is literally writing '?lang=' without the 's.
$1 - this is the first captured grouping from this line. Meaning whichever En OR Es was captured will be written here.
[L] - Tells the server to stop rewriting after the preceding directive (rule) is processed
[R] - Instructs Apache to issue a redirect, causing the browser to request the rewritten URL
[301] - Corresponds to a Moved Permanetly Header Code
[L,R=301] - Combines all 3 of these into one.

For this I think it's easiest to just use an example.
moz.com/En/htaccess-is-fun will be our example
Since this url passes the RewriteCond, it goes on to the RewriteRule where it finds En OR Es and stores that value as $1 (En) then takes whatever is left and stores it as $2 (htaccess-is-fun).
It then writes htaccess-is-fun?lang=En and replaces the original selection (which is En/htaccess-is-fun) with the new rewrite making the result moz.com/htaccess-is-fun?lang=En . The new URL is served as a 301-ed redirect.

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.[a-zA-Z0-9]{1,5}|/)$

RewriteCond - The condition of which a rewrite will take place
%{REQUEST_URI} - The URI that is requested from the server (everything after the domain and TLD i.e. moz.com/community 's URI would be /community)
! - declares negation. i.e. "!cheese" matches everything except "cheese"
() - is again a grouping
\ - escapes a special character. So "." means a literal dot.
a-zA-Z0-9 - matches all lowercase letters, all uppcase letters, and all numbers
{1,5} - matches one to five of the previous designation. Meaning that there can be any combination of a-z, A-Z, or 0-9 in a sequence of one to five. i.e. A2ps OR 12345 OR AbC etc.
| - Means OR
/ - literally just /
$ - Denotes the end of a regex

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1/ [L,R=301]

^ - Denotes the beginning of a regular expression (regex)
(.) - This is a wildcard. Once again the () is a grouping, but here the . means zero or more arbitrary characters
$ - Denotes the end of a regex
$1 - this is the first captured grouping from this line.
/ - literally just /
[L] - Tells the server to stop rewriting after the preceding directive (rule) is processed
[R] - Instructs Apache to issue a redirect, causing the browser to request the rewritten URL
[301] - Corresponds to a Moved Permanetly Header Code
[L,R=301] - Combines all 3 of these into one.

So whenever the RewriteCond is met, this rule will select everything and then rewrite it as a 301 with a / trailing it.

Hope this helps! Let me know if you have any other questions.

Regards,
Trenton

3 - In User Explorer, sort by transactions and you should be able to see users w/transactions. More specifically, if you create a segment (next to All Users) and create a new custom segment with:

• Conditions > Filter User > Include
• Transactions > per user > ≥ > 1

Then by looking through just this segment (select it on the top of the page) you will be able to see only users that have a transaction. You can then dive into these user's sessions by clicking their 'Client Id' and you can see the full path they took to conversion. This is assuming they didn't view any pages that did not have the GA code on them.

This combined with your other fixes should solve your issue and allow you to determine what drove the conversions!

Campaign timeouts - The issue here is that any new channel that drives traffic may not get the credit it deserves.
I would recommend to keep this at 6-12 months. You don't want credit going to a single channel because it drove the original session 24 months ago, because that was not the session that carried purchase intent.

Good luck! Let us know if we can help any further on this!

Trenton

Hey Darren,

While I guess you could say that this is a personal preference, it is not without reason for using this specific tracking manner.

The main advantage here is that you'll be tracking form completions, not when someone begins to fill out the form, so it's a more accurate means of tracking. Another advantage is that you'll handle both Google Analytics & Google AdWords tracking in one fell swoop. While you still need to 'import' the conversions to AdWords, there is no need to use the AdWords specific tracking code. Once Google Analytics & Google AdWords are linked, you'll simply just select that specific goal and then import it.

What the raventools link is saying is to put that bit of code in the actual code on the webpage(s) of your site, specifically in the submission section of the code. That way when the 'submit' button of the form is pressed, the code will execute triggering the event in your Google Analytics.

Let me know if you need any further clarification or help here!

Regards,
Trenton

Hey Varunrupal,

Great question and something that anyone doing outreach runs into from time to time.

This is a bit of a sticky situation. Guest posting is against Google's Guidelines, and paying for a guest post is doubly so. So I would encourage you to reply with a polite reply thanking them for their time.
Then move on and continue your outreach with other potential bloggers.

That said, I think if a blogger is wanting compensation for a post I would encourage you to change your offer to be a bit more appealing. If you can structure the outreach in a way that creates tangible value for the blogger or their readers, you're more likely to gain some traction without the need for monetary compensation. Make your value add the compensation.

Let me know if you have any other questions on this!

Regards,
Trenton

Hey Darren,

I'm assuming you want to track form completions as Adwords conversions here? I have a way for you to not have to use AdWord's conversion code that is relatively simple, but before we get to that I think the site may be having an issue that might be the reason for you not being able to verify the conversions as of yet.

When I went to http://www.gtwstorage.co.uk/ on both Android, Chrome, & Edge I wasn't able to get any of the forms to properly load. So I think there's a very real chance that this could be a reason for you to not be able to verify the conversion pixel.

Assuming that gets fixed, the best way to track form completions in AdWords as conversions is to implement event tracking in Google Analytics on all form submissions, then create a goal based on that specific event happening, and finally import this goal to AdWords (assuming the AdWords and Google Analytics profiles have already been linked).

If you need help with any of this:

• Here is the Google documentation on linking AdWords & Analytics
• Here is a link to a great tool from Raventools that makes Event creation easy to add to forms
• Here is Google's documentation on creating goals within Google Analytics, including event goals
• Here's some more information from Google about what events are & how they function
• Finally, here's how to import goals from Google Analytics to Google AdWords

While this is a good bit of reading, I promise you that it's worth your time. If you have any further questions on this feel free to respond in this thread and I'll help you through it!

Regards,
Trenton

Hey Chris,

There seems to be a bit of confusion in the answers here, so hopefully I can clear that up a bit.

There appears to be two parts to your question, I will address each separately.

• Does Google Shopping having a high bounce rate hurt organic rankings? No. Google is very adamant that these two areas are separate. They use different ranking algorithms and do not share data.
• If you instead meant Does Google Shopping having a high bounce rate affect Google Shopping ad rank, the answer is yes. There are ways to help improve your Google Shopping performance other than adding negative terms, which you absolutely should do weekly, specifically based around account structure. Search Engine Land has a good article on this here.

If you need additional clarification here, please feel free to respond to my post & I'll help you out ASAP!

Best regards!
Trenton