Webtrends On Demand Recognizes Google Ad Services

August 7th, 2012

Topics: Ads, Advertising, Analytics, Digital Marketing, Featured, Marketing Optimization, Search Engine Marketing

Recently, Google Ads announced changes to improve the user experience when a Google ad is clicked. As a result, they are changing the format of some referrers that come from Google Ads. The changes will go fully into effect at Google Ads during August, 2012. The old format of the affected referrers look like one of the following:

http://www.google.com/search?…&q=flowers&…

http://www.google.com/aclk?…&q=flowers&…

Now a third possible format is being introduced during July and August:

http://www.googleadservices.com/pagead/aclk?…&q=flowers&…&ohost=www.google.ca&…

Webtrends On Demand made a change on July 17 to recognize the new format as search engine “Google Ad Services”, while the previous example formats shown above will still be recognized as search engine “Google”.

We will continue to monitor updates in this area.

  • Google Analytics Tutorials

    Nice.

  • Guest

    is this really the right heading? does the referrer impact the ui?

    • other guest

      I think what he’s saying is that there are some reports that automatically group referrers, and one of the groups is SEM. Webtrends works from a pre-programmed list of referrers when sorting visits into these groups. And now Webtrends’ list has been modified to include this new referring domain.

      Does that help?