Products inside Merchant Centre have pre-set UTM parameters
All products inside Merchant Centre have UTM parameters set at every landing page link which look like they’re from the free shopping listings –
utm_content=sag_organic
These must have been automatically applied. Is this the norm?
These are being pushed into Shopify and Google Ads so the landing page links from ads include these ‘organic’ UTMs, which doesn’t seem right to me.
Do people remove those from the landing page link in Merchant Centre, just leave and everything will track as expected or something else? Thanks
The short answer is:
The utm_content=sag_organic parameter is automatically appended by Google Merchant Center (GMC) to links originating from Surfaces Across Google (SAG), which includes free product listings.
This is the normal and intended behavior for Google to categorize traffic correctly in tools like Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and is a cost-effective way to distinguish organic product listing traffic.
You should not remove these, as doing so will prevent the accurate attribution of your free organic traffic.
The issue of these parameters appearing in other systems like Shopify or Google Ads is often due to an overly broad or simple tracking setup that’s not correctly differentiating between sources.
The optimal technical solution is to use the Google Ads API to manage your paid shopping feed and the Google Analytics Data API to analyze the clean data, while employing a server-side tagging solution (GTM + Stape/GCP) or custom API integration to strip or normalize these parameters specifically for paid channels, ensuring clean data synchronization.
The long answer is:
The presence of utm_content=sag_organic on your product landing page URLs is not only the norm but is a critical component of Google’s free product listing initiative, Surfaces Across Google (SAG).
Google automatically injects these parameters to ensure that traffic from these non-paid channels is correctly attributed as organic in tools like Google Analytics 4 (GA4).
Removing these parameters directly within the Merchant Center would be detrimental, as it would cause this valuable organic traffic to be misclassified, likely as direct or an un-attributable referral, leading to incorrect performance assessment – this is a cost-effective benefit of letting Google manage the tagging for organic discovery.
The core of your problem is the propagation of this organic tracking information into your paid channels, specifically Google Ads, which causes paid clicks to be mislabeled as organic within your internal systems like Shopify.
To solve this technically and ensure clean data separation, you should implement a system that differentiates the traffic based on the source before the data is recorded in your systems.
One highly effective, cost-effective, and scalable approach is to utilize a server-side tagging infrastructure, potentially hosted on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and managed by Google Tag Manager (GTM) with a service like Stape.
This setup would allow you to inspect the incoming request’s referrer or click ID and, for traffic specifically identified as Google Ads (which should have its own set of utm_source/gclid parameters), you can execute a logic that strips out or overrides the unwanted utm_content=sag_organic parameter before the final page view or event data is sent to your server-side endpoint or even to Shopify’s tracking pixel.
For your Google Ads management, you should leverage the Google Ads API to ensure programmatic control over your Shopping campaigns’ feed rules and tracking templates, allowing you to explicitly define the paid tracking parameters and, if necessary, block the inclusion of any organic parameters at the paid ad level, thus ensuring cost-effective, clean separation of your paid and organic product data.
Furthermore, integrating the Google Analytics Data API with a reporting layer like Looker Studio API would allow you to build custom dashboards that pull the clean, attributed data from GA4 and compare the performance of your paid Google Ads traffic (tracked with gclid and clean UTMs) against the organic SAG traffic (tracked with sag_organic), providing a single source of truth for marketing performance without the clutter of misattributed parameters.
The combined API approach ensures that you preserve the integrity of your free organic traffic tracking while sanitizing the data for your paid campaigns and internal systems.
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