Thursday, June 25, 2015

Upgrade your URLs before July 1, 2015

We introduced Upgraded URLs in February to help you manage your landing page and tracking information separately, using the new final URL and tracking template fields. This new URL structure lets you track more insights into your ad performance, scale tracking updates across your account, and keep your ads running while making updates to your shared tracking templates.

As a reminder, all advertisers will need to use Upgraded URLs in place of destination URLs starting on July 1, 2015. If you do not use tracking parameters in your destination URLs or only use auto-tagging, you can wait for the auto-upgrade starting on July 1st.1

Today, we’d like to share tips to help you take advantage of the benefits of Upgraded URLs, and stories from advertisers who are succeeding with the new and improved URL system.

Tips for upgrading your URLs
  1. To track audience, location and mobile performance, add the new ValueTrack parameters to your tracking templates using the advanced upgrade.2
  2. Keep your ads running even while you make important edits to your tracking using the new shared tracking templates. For example, if you launch a new promotion, add your new tracking parameters to your campaign level tracking template - saving you time and avoid losing potential new business.
  3. If you make frequent tracking updates across your account, use the advanced upgrade and shared tracking templates. This lets you make tracking updates in one place and apply them to your entire account, campaign or ad groups.
To learn more about the benefits of Upgraded URLs, check out this video.

Early success

From time savings to reliable and scalable tracking management - here are some of the success stories we’ve heard from advertisers who are using Upgraded URLs.

"Our clients like to move fast, which means a lot of changes to landing pages and tracking that we need to append onto our URLs. Upgraded URLs let us be nimble with these changes, without the risk of losing our ad history or triggering a review. The new value track parameters let us see deeper insights into our business, and we can set them at the account level for easier implementation. I absolutely recommend upgrading to any advertiser." — Sean McEntee, Account Lead at 3Q Digital

"Upgraded URLs let us set different final URLs for mobile and desktop under the umbrella of a single ad. This gives our teams and our advertisers’ businesses a more reliable way to update tracking and helps ensure customers land on the appropriate page, rather than relying on URL redirects." — David Gong, Director of Strategic Accounts at PMG

Upgrade today

If you haven’t updated your URLs yet, check out our blog or the upgrade guide to learn how you can upgrade them today. As always, please contact us at any time for help with the upgrade.

Posted by Leo Sei, Product Manager, Google AdWords

Your destination URLs will automatically be moved to the new final URL field for any ad groups that do not contain active or paused cross-domain redirect URLs. 
Adding the new ValueTrack parameters using the advanced upgrade, will reset your ad stats once during the upgrade. After the upgrade, any changes to your shared tracking template or custom parameters will not reset your stats. As a reminder, you can always access your historical ad stats in your normal AdWords reporting.