HubSpot auto tracking messing up tracking in Google Ads
Hi
A couple of months ago we connected HubSpot auto tracking to our Google Ads account.
The instruction says that this should work fine:
"Auto tracking
See which ads your contacts are clicking on and converting on. We will automatically add tracking parameters to all of your ads without overwriting any existing parameters. Learn more", but the "without overwriting any exsiting parameters" is exactly what happened to us and we lost our tracking in Google Ads. Once we disconnected auto tracking, the problem dissapeared.
What could be the issue here? We would need to be able to track ads and conversions both in Google Ads but also all the way in HubSpot as well, so it would be beneficial for us to solve this issue. Anyone with similar experiences or a solution?
You'll notice that HubSpot uses utm_source=adwords and utm_medium=ppc and not the default utm_source=google and utm_medium=cpc
We go into the admin area of GA and add in the parameters that need to marry up.
We split Branded and Generic search into seperate channels, so you'll need to do it for both.
Your numbers will never marry up because attribution for GA and Google Ads are different, but it gives you a chance of having the right data reported in three places and for it not to be too funky looking.
For display campaigns we use (the placement is the important difference)
it depends on how you make the tracking work in Google Ads.
The Hubspot Connection lets you only track the conversions within HubSpot (Marketing -> Ads), the conversion Tracking in Google Ads has to setup additionally.
Here how we solved it with Google Ads and Google Tag Manager:
First of all we set up the trigger for our Landing Page in GTM:
Then we create a conversion in Google Ads:
Connect the Conversion to GTM:
The last step is to connect the Conversion to your Google Ads Campaing:
Now the Conversions will be shown in Google Ads:
Also, you can see the conversions now in your Google Analytics of course:
So if I understood correctly the Auto Tracking kind of works only one way and only shows the conversions correctly in HubSpot? I thought it was an overall connection between HubSpot and Ads – which would make tracking work both ways.
Does this mean that we always have to create the conversions separately in Ads – otherwise the connection and Auto Tracking will mess up our reporting in Google Ads?
yes the connection only works one way, because of course, HubSpot can't set up all the tracking needed in Google Ads to make it work properly, I think there are several reasons for this, it would screw up people already having tracking in place which they don't want to lose, it would cause issues because there are like 100 ways to implement tracking with google ads (and all of those are working).
No, HubSpot won't mess with your data in Google Ads, it will only show the data from Ads and Conversions in HubSpot - therefore you just can set up the tracking in Google Ads like you would without HubSpot.
Just look at it as two different systems for tracking your conversion, were both Systems serve different purposes.
As an example in Google Ads you can not see "who" converted, in HubSpot you can track it back to the person who converted - while in HubSpot you only can make like little changes to your Campaigns, where you have a whole toolbox of instruments for optimizing your campaigns in google ads.