Upgraded URLs

One of the ongoing frustrations we encounter as PPC specialists is losing the months of hard earned data following updates to destination URL tracking. When using value tracking parameters or a 3^rd party tracking service, these changes are all too frequent. A work around to this is creating duplicate ads with new URLs, however this because time consuming and often difficult to manage (100 paused versions of the same ads with unique URLs? No thanks!). Google’s newly rolled out Upgraded URLs may be a partial fix to this issue.

While Upgraded URLs will not be of benefit to complete landing page changes, they will allow us to flexibly update tracking parameters while maintaining data and Quality Score. Google has redefined landing pages by treating Destination URLs and the newly created Final URLs as separate entities. By establishing the Final URL, you are telling Google what the domain is (similar to Display URLs), and by using the newly developed tracking template and custom parameter fields, you can easily append the tracking parameters to the Final URL.

This not only provides access to new insights into ad interaction, it will (hopefully!) save advertisers considerable time in managing URL tracking updates.

I am eager to see if this is another great Google innovation, or if it will be sunsetted like many of its other Beta roll-outs.