I want to be able to track PPC campaigns, adgroups and keywords automatically using Snowplow. It seems that these parameters need to be manually set in order to track them in snowplow. Currently all we can see in the utm tag is utm_adgroup={Adgroup}
Does anyone have another solution to this, or an explanation as to why we can’t track this automatically? I’ve been told that it can be automatically tracked in Kenshoo. What information can Kenshoo get that we couldn’t get with snowplow?
Here is some documentation about the problem that offers the solution to manually set the parameters:
Sorry if this explanation isn’t clear, I am new to Snowplow!
there are broadly two approaches to tracking your Adwords campaign metadata in Snowplow:
Use Adwords ValueTrack parameters to track the relevant ad metadata as parameters on the querystring. This is described here. You’d use the campaign enrichment to pick out the relevant values in the querystring and load them into dedicated columns in Redshift
Have a separate process for fetching your Adwords data from the Adwords API and match this up to your Snowplow data using the gclid parameter that Google uses internally to record each click and then join back to the relevant campaign metadata tables.
If you do want to go route (2) I recommend speaking to @mike and the team at Poplin, who’ve built a process that fetches that data at the GCLID level. (Other users have built the relevant technology themselves, but as far as I know no one has made it available.)
We haven’t managed to nail an exact gclid to individual cost (Google don’t like giving this out), but we can extract a relatively close cost by matching the gclid with the average CPC on a number of dimensions. Depending on the number of clicks across those dimensions you can often obtain a reasonable accurate estimate of cost per click for a given gclid.
At the moment we use Snowplow data (gclid) combined with reporting data that we extract from the Adwords API to do this.