I've identified a discrepancy between Google Ads clicks and Analytics sessions in Paid Search (about twice more clicks than sessions). So I contacted Google Ads support and after a long conversation, they send me an email saying that my website structure uses redirections and it's making it lose parameters, and that I had to contact a developer to solve that problem because they don't give assistance on it. What exactly they told me to tell the developer was that:
Loss of parameters by redirection
The website trendotrends.com is not holding navigation parameters because of the structure in which it was developed.
To verify this redirection, simply replicate the following steps: I accessed the link https://trendotrends.com/products/running-shoes?variant=15320930779194 After full site loading, I added the & gclid = Tester123 parameter to the URL (in the browser, so the final URL was https://trendotrends.com/products/running-shoes?variant=15320930779194&gclid=Tester123) and hit Enter To understand if there is a redirect, the normal behavior would be for the URL to remain the same (with & gclid = Tester123 at the end), but in this case, the parameter disappears (and hence the assignment) This link was just an example, which can be verified in several other products of the site.
They also said I can't use manual tagging (UTMs) instead of automatic tagging in Google Ads because those redirections are also going to spoil the UTMs.
I don't use any redirections in my website and I have also tested with UTMs and there's also a discrepancy in google analytics data for that.
But before I contact a developer and invest on this fix, I would like to know if anyone had experienced that? If Googles answer fits this problem? And even if is there a way to fix it without being an expert.
Thanks in advance.
The issue here isn't really that there's a redirect (301), but a state change. There is javascript on the page that essentially rewrites the URL before the GA code can parse it.
Are you able to change to a different theme and test if this happens with that theme?