This morning, my heart ached. I was crushed and I could hardly breathe. My lungs burned as I tried desperately to cry and breathe normally.
Why?
I noticed a landing page with a CTCR of less than 70%.
The absolute horror.
GCLIDs were dropped from my URLs.
30% of the clicks could not be tracked for conversions.
And this had probably been going on for over 3 months!
Even worse, some campaigns were running on Smart Bidding.
Not only had I been underreporting the results of my efforts for 3 months, the Smart Bidding AI had probably been downscaling the actual results for 3 months as well.
All this for no good reason, other than a bug in our conversion tracking setup.
If I had fed the machine the real conversion value of the clicks, it would probably have generated a lot more clicks and conversions.
Don’t be like me. Please check your CTCR.
See: https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/9600552
– Nils
PS: Want to prevent the number 1 cause of GCLIDs being dropped? Fix your Final URLs that have redirects.