Adwords campaign - getting "source=hp" in redirect parameters

[giggle]

hi

Like many we have software in place that analyses the referral string and puts the results into a database for reporting.

When we create a Google Adword campaign we use ?paidclick=CAMPAIGN so that we can track the adwords referral.

Recently we've seen a lot of referrals with "paidclick=HP" in the URL (we don't use HP as a campaign identifier) and they're normally for a search result that we rank well for and are in the free listing page that the referral links back to.

Anyone know what that HP is about? Is there a bug in our software (or Googles?).

Thanks

Mick

[RhinoFish]

i don't think this is a PPC question. sounds like on the SEO side of things, the engines have picked up this data pair somewhere and decided to use it as the default url for some of your indexed pages in the organic results. if you're PPC team is not adding that HP data to strings, someone is... perhaps something on the seo side of the house, like backlink campaigns. it's also possible that someone outsourced a media buy and they noticed your PPC encoding and so an external party has added that code to some media but for tracking purposes.

suggest you ask your webmaster to scan your entire website's code and look for that data pair to see if it's been added in house on accident.

and let your seo manager know you've got an indexing anomaly going on.

[giggle]

Thanks RhinoFish.

I can't find any reference to that pair anywhere in any of our code. We can't find any reference to HP in AdWords campaigns. We're not involved in any backlink campaigns at the moment (but will start one soon).

The strange thing is that we had PPC switched off last night and still the paidclick=HP came through (along with some paidclick=WEB, which we don't use either). I confirmed that every paidclick=HP came from a page where we were displayed in the free listings.

Got me scratching my head.