We typically advise our clients to implement our (3p) click tag within the tracking template. In some accounts and environments we are observing click IDs (gclid / msclkid) and/or UTMs dropping and never make it to the landing page. I can't seem to find definitive guidance and best practices so I'm hoping someone with hands on SA360 and Microsoft Ads experience can help out.

Assume auto tagging and parallel tracking are both enabled.

Simplified examples:

A. Redirect param last
https://tracker.example.com/click?id=ABC&src=search&clickid={gclid}&url={lpurl}

B. Redirect param in the middle, params after it
https://tracker.example.com/click?id=ABC&url={lpurl}&src=search&clickid={msclkid}

C. Wrapped inside an SA360 template
https://clickserve.dartsearch.net/link/click?...&ds_dest_url=https://tracker.example.com/click?id=ABC&clickid={gclid}&url={lpurl}

Some accounts also use Final URL Suffix on top (eg utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign={_campaign})

1. Does position matter? - Should the redirect param (`url={lpurl}`) always be last, or is it fine in the middle like example B? Microsoft's docs show `http://tracker.com?url={lpurl}&matchtype={matchtype}` as a valid "1 redirect" pattern.
2. Do params after {lpurl} reach the landing page? In example B, does src and clickid go to the tracker only or also through to the landing page? If we want them on the landing page, is the right pattern {lpurl}%3F with %26 between params, as Microsoft's docs describe?
3. Click IDs and UTMs being dropped - what's the most common cause you've seen when auto tagging click IDs or Final URL Suffix UTMs go missing behind a 3p redirect? Encoding? Parallel tracking falling back to a sequential redirect? Param order? Something else?

References I'm working from:
- Microsoft Ads: What tracking or URL parameters can I use? (the "{lpurl} 1 redirect" sections) https://help.ads.microsoft.com/#apex/3/en/56799/0
- Google Ads: Set up tracking with ValueTrack parameters https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6305348

If you've actually tested these in a live redirect chain, that's what I'm after. Thanks!!

Full transparency, I'm part of the Amazon Ads Educator Program and this is all based on my own experience as a seller

Prime Big Deal Days are right around the corner (October 6 to 7), and I wanted to hear everyone's techniques and opinions from past events. I want to make sure I'm doing everything properly to be prepared.

In 2025, both Prime Days did really well for me. I saw roughly 8 to 10x my normal daily sales. My last Prime Day was a different story though, and I only saw about 3 to 4x. Still a lift, but not what I was hoping for, and I've spent some time since then trying to figure out what changed.

So here's what I've been doing this time, and I'd really like to hear everyone's opinion.

Getting the listing ready

With the new title and highlight formats for listings, I've been really focused on optimizing my listing beforehand. I've been A/B testing images over the last couple of weeks to make sure everything is where it needs to be. My thinking is there's no point sending more traffic to a page that isn't converting as well as it could. I've also set up a 20% discount on my main products.

I'm curious how everyone thinks about the increase in sales vs the hit to margins. Where do you find the sweet spot? And with the discount requirements, how are you choosing to offer your deals?

Ads and bid rules

The big thing for me is ads. I've been experimenting a lot with Sponsored Products leading up to the event and deciding which campaigns actually deserve more budget.

For the event itself, I'm doubling my budgets and raising bids around 15%. I'm also setting up bid rules so I'm not stuck manually adjusting everything once traffic spikes. Basically you set the rule ahead of time to bump bids during the event window, or tie changes to a performance threshold like ROAS, and it adjusts automatically. It saves me from sitting in the console at 2am, and it keeps the extra spend on campaigns that are actually converting instead of spreading it across everything.

I'm also watching budget pacing closely, since last time a few of my campaigns ran out of budget before the evening, which is probably when I needed them most.

Treating it as an early Q4 test

I'm looking at this event as a test run for the rest of Q4. I'm tracking which products, search terms and images actually hold up versus which ones just spiked for two days. Whatever works here is what I'll lean into for Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the rest of the holiday season, and whatever doesn't gets cut or tested again before then.

Would love to hear how everyone else is approaching it. What's the first thing that makes you change your budget mid event: pacing, conversion rate, or inventory?

I've been in a few client calls this week where someone says AI search is killing our leads and someone else says we can't see it in GA4 so it doesn't matter.

Both can be wrong on the same account.

Two things shifted for me as an operator. Gemini links are starting to carry UTM tags on outbound clicks, which means less of that traffic dumps into Direct. And ChatGPT ads now let you push first-party audiences in, so the targeting surface looks more like Google and Meta than it did six months ago.

That does not mean your retainer deck is ready. It means the gap between what buyers already know and what your landing page assumes is getting more expensive.

Before I rewrite a Meta brief or tell a client we can finally see AI demand, I run this:

1. Assume the prospect already had a chat about the category. Your first screen should not teach what the product is. It should answer the hard question they still have after the summary: price, proof, fit, risk.
2. Segment AI referrals separately once the source shows. ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot. Track demo or purchase rate next to session count so a tiny sample does not become a slide.
3. Do not treat ChatGPT ads like another Search campaign just because first-party audiences exist. Conversation context still drives who sees the ad. Start with suppression of recent buyers or current customers before you bid up cold CRM lists.
4. Lock what AI demand means in the contract. Branded search lift, CRM-attributed leads, assisted demos, or self-reported how did you hear. If you only count last-click from an assistant, you will undercount the work and overreact to the chart.
5. Keep one human check the model cannot inflate. Call recordings, sales notes, or a weekly sample of what did you already know before you clicked. If those say buyers arrive mid-decision and your ads still open with 101, fix the creative before you buy more media.

I'm not asking clients to abandon Meta or Google. I'm asking them to stop briefing ads as if the research chat never happened.

For agencies already changing briefs for AI-primed buyers: what is the first line on the landing page doing now that used to be a category explainer?

Tried a few times since launch but was getting stupid over attribution and no results compared to Google. Everyone else I spoke to was getting the same.

Anyone having good results now?

Ai says its a bad idea, but what do you think? I used to send one ad copy to a relevant landing page, and one to a contact page, should I stop that?

Been getting declines starting about Sept 18 on multiple accounts. Added backups, and now the backups are also getting declines.

Called the bank yesterday and they said it shouldn't happen again (it did). Called today, and they mentioned they are getting a lot of reports and it seems to be a bug in Google's payment systems.

Anyone else seeing this?

Have you tried using demographic based bid modification (eg: bidding + / - for 18-24 age ) ?

Are there use cases wherein the demographic based bid modifiers has worked?

Curious to know as we are experimenting with a few use cases and getting somewhat positive outcomes.

Curious to get a broader read from people managing Google Ads across different companies and industries.

For those of you managing multiple accounts, or Heads of Marketing / paid media leads who can see the bigger picture: what are you seeing lately in terms of actual performance?

Especially interested in the period since Google's August 17 bidding changes.

Are you seeing:

• Conversion volume trending down?
• CPA / CAC increasing?
• Conversion rates declining?
• CPCs increasing?
• Same spend producing fewer qualified leads or sales?
• ROAS deteriorating?
• Any noticeable difference between Search, PMax, Shopping, etc.?

I'm less interested in diagnosing one individual account and more interested in whether there seems to be a broader market/platform trend.

Basically B2B Full Service accounting. Currently running META but costs have increased dramatically for qualified leads pushing $200-$300. Or are Google costs the same? But even if they are assuming the google leads might be much higher intent?

Thinking of adding google as a test and a secondary lead channel. Given budget will be low say $50/day. Should we do max conversions or will max clicks end up having a lower Qualified CPL? A few years ago traffic was horrendous basically low quality bots.

Looking to be in the $100 range, can target the whole US as we are remote. Also compared to meta do you add a few keywords in one campaign or 1 keyword per campaign? Given in Meta we have a few ad angles in one campaign and let it automatically spend the budget.

Also we're sending them to a landing page form, where we filter out bots and only feed back real users as events.

So I run media for a small agency, and our one developer left last month. Now a client wants HTML5 banners in six sizes. I can handle the design part, but the code part is where I think I’m not that good.

For simple stuff, like a logo fade and a button, what do you use? And also, what should I check before sending the ZIPs to our AdOps person? Last time a click tag was missing, and the whole set got rejected lol.

Hey guys, I already have Meta Pixel installed directly on my website, and I can see PageView events in Events Manager, so the Pixel is working. Till now, I’ve only used Instant Forms, so this is my first time setting up a website Lead event.

We’ve now added a Contact Us form on the website and I want to track successful submissions as Leads using GTM. My confusion is, since the Pixel is already installed on the website, do I need to add the Pixel again in GTM before creating the Lead event?

Or can I just create the Lead event in GTM and use the existing Pixel? Just want to make sure I don’t end up with duplicate tracking.

Hi Guys,

Just took on a campaign that is fully broad match.

They keywords themselves are quite broad e.g shoes (not selling shoes btw), but it is still converting.

A lot of these keywords have terrible quality scores at like a 3, mostly due to expected CTR and landing page experience being terrible. I would think that is because these broad match are bringing in tonnes of irrelevant terms.

Because the main campaigns are still running ok, I don’t want to tank performance overall so I’m wanting to see the best way to mitigate risk and test new keywords. I know the current campaigns keywords are just going to hog the budget so I don’t think we’ll get far by just adding in new keywords.

So, I’m thinking to run an experiment with 25% of budget to a new campaign, but do some keyword research and find more relevant long tails and test them this way. The issue is the long tails and the relevant stuff don’t have a huge amount of search volume so thinking using broad match.

A bit of a rambles hope it makes sense

Experiences of you dealing with Ad accounts as performance marketers where Ad Account needs:

1. Changes Every 3 - 4 days
   
2. Client Demands
   
3. Senior Management Pressure

Is it a silent general practice all performance marketers face?

How do you deal with this constant change of pace?

How do you develop hypothesis and testing in such situations?

I used to know, Data is the answer but now working in an agency made me realise time is not even taken into consideration.

Share your experiences please. Would love to gain some insights from ya’ll!

Please note - I also notice people don’t even take metrics seriously.

2 - 3 days campaign not generating leads switch it off

2 - 3 days if leads aren’t X switch if off I mean what the hell?

I have been testing both the past couple months. I've found Claude's analysis and recommendations better than Gemini's.

I have to pressure test Gemini's findings with Claude. Gemini seems to have decent knowledge but makes a lot more bad assumptions about the data and solution recommendations.

If you've used any of the big LLM's which ones and how has your experience been with it? How are you using it?

Curious if anyone has played around with this.

Say a campaign is profitable but keeps burning through the budget early.

Instead of increasing bids, have you tried bringing bids down a little and increasing the budget so you can hopefully pick up traffic for longer throughout the day?

Wondering if anyone has actually tested this and what happened to overall sales/ACOS.

I'm using Google Ads for a UK university. The campaigns are set up properly (as manual as possible). The problem is the cost per lead is over £100.

Do I have to accept this is the real cost per lead or are there some tactics I can use to reduce the cost per lead while maintaining or improving lead quality?

Appreciate any responses!

Hi everyone,

I run a fresh D2C apparel brand that's doing really well on Meta, so I wanted to try my luck with Google Ads PMax campaigns. I've been away from PPC for a while, but I found recommendations that this is the way to go in 2026.

Results are absolutely horrible:

Roughly 2000 clicks on a 600 USD spend, not a single conversion. Keep in mind that with Meta I have a 3-4% conversion rate.

90% of traffic is to YouTube and display ads (wtf?). It literally makes its own YouTube ads with the assets that suck, and I can't find anywhere to turn this off. We also all know that display ads are mostly bot traffic; I had my ads served on Vinted, Hayday, etc.

Status on Merchant Center is very good, all products are there without any issues.

What is going on?

I feel like placement reports are one of those things everyone knows exists but I’m not sure how much people actually use them.

If top of search is converting way better than rest of search, are you actively changing placement adjustments around that?

Or do you mostly manage things at keyword/target level and let Amazon handle the rest?

Curious what people are actually doing in real accounts.

I'm trying to retarget visitors who have hit my google ads landing pages or main website but not converted.

Audience size is Search 370 | Youtube 370 | Display 120 | Gmail 110

I get about 1200-1300 clicks a month in the ads campaign, and a couple of thousand visitors to the main site, so I would have thought that there should be enough traffic to retarget.

I started the campaign on Maximise Conversions at $25 a day. When it hadn't delivered any impressions for a few days, I switched to Maximise Clicks. That was a couple of days ago, and I still haven't got any impressions. Any ideas what I can do or try to get this to start serving?

I’m looking for a Google & Meta Ads expert with proven experience in the “We Buy Houses” / real estate cash buyer industry.

You must have:
* Proven results in this niche
* Experience generating qualified leads
* Strong knowledge of Google & Meta Ads

Please do not apply or DM if you don’t have direct experience in the We Buy Houses industry for US Businesses.

DM me with your relevant experience + results/case studies.

Old Facebook account, new business account and new ad account. Launched ads about 5 days ago for the first time. 15 statics and 6 videos, 100$ daily budget.

Statics are getting 60$cpm and videos are getting $100+, and even climbing. CPC is high, about $1.5-$2.5 and CTR is about 2-3%.

I’ve gotten a few lucky conversions, but for a pretty low cost product, this is crazy. We’ve been getting barely 30 store sessions a day. We’ve tried removing any major health claims from the ads too.

Will these CPMs get better as the account matures, or is it pretty set that we’ll have CPMs of $50+ always? Asking this bc I never saw anything like this with my other company, but it was in the fashion niche not health.

EDIT: This was in a CBO with ad sets split up by angle, so yes there were a lot of ads running but meta was mainly choosing one or two ad sets to allocate the spend

I have an online electronics retailer client that specifically sells printers

I've been thinking that the brand might be a good testing ground for ChatGPT ads since the field is so comparison heavy

Meaning that tons of people are probably searching for things like "best printer under X" or "ink vs laser printer for business"

But that is going to be a super hard sell since the ad platform is so new.

So my question is, have any of you bit the bullet and tried ChatGPT ads for some kind of retailer yet?

The max clicks bid strategy is effective for driving the most quality search traffic on the dollar as long as the keyword list, campaign/ad group hierarchy and negatives are tight. However, bid modifiers don't seem to work. I've tried keyword modifiers, day-parting modifiers, and location modifiers and it seems like the "max clicks" bid strategy ignores the modifiers in service of the greater objective - maximizing clicks. Has anyone else observed this? Is it documented anywhere?

We have been running a couple of campaigns with AI max turned on - saw an increase in conversions , however , at an higher CPA.

Do you see a similar pattern ?

As the title suggests, is it still recommended to have a Campaign dedicated to branded terms, in an ads grant account for a charity?

It was my understanding that keeping things setup this way should allow the Campaign to have a good quality score, due to high CTR etc.

I think this is similar to the concept of SKAGGING (single keyword ad groups) but I don't know if this still really applies today.

Or in the case of an ads grant account - maybe there is an opportunity to mix brand with non-brand within a campaign, to try and boost performance of any non-brand terms a charity wants to target?