Tagged links - do they work with AdWords?

Or does AdWords have to be done via linked accounts?

[CherryHintonBlue]

As an agency service, I send traffic from *my* Google AdWords account to clients' websites, which are monitored by *their* Google Analytics accounts. I need them to be able to distinguish my CPC-originated traffic clearly, but I do not want cost data being shown.

I understand linked accounts and auto-tagging, which isn't appropriate here, and the clients' Google Analytics accounts are not linked to any Google AdWords account.

I assumed all I needed to do was to set up my AdWords ads with suitable tags, using the Google "URL Builder". Using this, I've set up links such as:

www.#*$!.co.uk/product.asp?utm_source=agencyadwords&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=yyy

However, the result in the clients' Google Analytics accounts is not what I'd expect. The traffic does appear (it shows under "Traffic Sources" as "cpc"). However under "AdWords Campaigns" and "Campaigns" where I'd expect it to be broken down by campaign, it's just amalgamated as "(not set)", which looks very unprofessional.

Any suggestions how I get the campaign variable to show? With some clients I have multiple campaigns, so I want the "cpc" traffic broken down for them, rather than all traffic showing as "(not set)".

[Receptional]

Not very easy to do this, IMHO. There is a way to reassociate the Adwords account with the analytics account, but it's always painful and sounds like you don't want to do this anyway. If you don't want to show the client the cpc then Google are gong to make life hard for you anyway (even though, in their weird moral world they find it morally right not to make the cpc transparant for their publishers or even explain why two identical ads to identical pages might have different cpc ranges in different accounts.)

If you can get your hands on Yahoo Analytics, you could run this in parallel, but I still think the client will see the same disconnect in GA.

Dixon.

[CherryHintonBlue]

Thanks Dixon. I think I've solved the problem! The key appears to be to turn off auto-tagging in preferences on the AdWords account. (Obvious, I know). I reckon that what happens is that with this "on", AdWords automatically adds its utm_ tags to the ads, and if you're adding more utm_ tags manually via the ads' destination URLs, the whole thing falls to pieces.

So if you want AdWords ads to effectively be registered in a remote unlinked Analytics account as a new class of CPC ads, but not standard AdWords with all the cost data, then ensure that auto-tagging is off in the AdWords account, and then add your own manual tags to the ads' destination URLs.

In the client's Analytics account, no traffic now appears under "AdWords", but instead, the traffic from the ads appears under "Campaigns" with a source of whatever you've set in the utm_source parameter, e.g "adwordsfromyouragency" and a campaign of whatever you've set in the utm_campaign parameter - I use a different one for each ad group here, named so it's clear to the client.

I guess this means the clients could still have their own AdWords campaigns running separate to this, with auto-tagging and the full cost data being shown. This would appear under "AdWords" rather than under "Campaigns".