ShareASale is pleased to announce that we've developed a solution to provide ITP-compliant tracking for affiliates running Adwords campaigns monetized with ShareASale affiliate links. Our future-proof solution will prevent any affiliate conversion loss from the Google Adwords Parallel Tracking update, which no longer allows ad network tracking URLs to control the customer's ultimate landing page.
Google Adword's Parallel Tracking schema uses the Final URL as the ultimate landing page for the customer, preventing tracking link URLs from passing click ID or affiliate information to merchant's websites, which is a more secure form of tracking. For more information on Parallel Tracking, click here to view Google's Adwords support documentation.
ShareASale's solution maintains tracking by associating Google's Click ID value gclid to our native Click ID values. This additional piece of information allows ShareASale to attribute a sales transaction or conversion based on both our standard tracking methodology and by using Google's Click IDs.
- To apply this solution to your own Adwords campaigns, make these two adjustments:
1. Add the following query string parameter to the Final URL value in an Ad:
sscid={gclid} eg. https://www.merchantdomain.com/?sscid={gclid} {gclid} is a Google macro that returns their click ID. Effecting this change passes Google's click ID values to the merchant, who stores these values and communicates them back to ShareASale upon conversion.
2. Add the following query string parameters to the Tracking template value in an ad: xrdrm=1&gclid {gclid} eg. https://shareasale.com/r.cfm?b=XXXX&u=YYYY&m=ZZZZ&xrdrm=1&gclid={gclid} (where XXXX, YYYY, and ZZZZ are replaced with real tracking URL values). The xrdrm=1 parameter sends a redirect message to Google and gclid={gclid} passes Google's Click ID to ShareASale. This allows us to map Google's Click ID for that user to a ShareASale Click ID value, allowing ShareASale to use these values to run tracking and attribution.