I have an Adwords account where I have a Search Network campaign running with Adwords auto-tagging turned ON.
I am also importing the Google Analytics ecommerce transaction as the conversion metric in Adwords, and it feels that not all transactions are being tracked correctly.
I have been searching for a possible reason and noticed that if I click a Search ad, Adwords auto-tagging parameter is passed in the link, but when I reach the website and try to check the _utmz cookie all of it fields are "not set".
_utmz Cookie:
116640790.1503410152.7.4.utmgclid=CjwKCAjwrO_MBRBxEiwAYJnDLOZVKfjyDHp0yb67pjwJe84czaI7sizXI_d8TMFcrUNsZwXaVKFAUBoCB38QAvD_BwE|utmccn=(not%20set)|utmcmd=(not%20set)|utmctr=(not%20provided)
I am wondering if that is normal and despite that Google can still make the correct attributions for transactions or if that is the source of the problem. I have done it in other websites and it also occurs in some of them, not all.
I would really appreciate some insights on this.
Thanks! :)
Do you see traffic coming in as Direct or is it bucketed as Paid Search? Can you test your own ad and use the Real-time report to see source/medium? I'd confirm in the UI before getting concerned based on the cookie value.
That all said, I highly recommend changing the Google Analytics tracking code to analytics.js (Universal Analytics). You get a lot more mileage out of this tag than continuing to use ga.js.