Can you track web traffic using UTM parameters and then later retarget those folks in a Google Ad?
Hello! I want to set up UTM parameters to track who is visiting a website that we’re promoting through non-digital ads. Then after our non-digital campaign is complete, we want to retarget all the folks who went to that link and send them a Google Ad.
How does one go about this?
I’ve tried to watch videos about UTM tracking/Google Ads, but all the ones I’ve seen are showing me how to set up UTM tracking on a link that I am serving within my Google Ad. That’s not my goal. Thanks so much!
The short answer is:
You can’t directly use UTM parameters alone to create a retargeting audience in Google Ads, because UTMs are a marketing tracking tool and not an audience-building tool.
The standard way to build a retargeting audience is by using a Google Ads tag or Google Analytics 4 (GA4) tag on your website to collect visitors, and then creating a Google Ads Audience based on those visitors.
However, because you want to specifically target people who arrived via your non-digital campaign’s UTM-tagged URL, you can achieve this by capturing the UTM parameters on the page and then sending them to Google Analytics 4 as an audience-building signal.
This is often done by setting up a Google Tag Manager (GTM) event that fires a Google Ads or GA4 tag when the specific UTM parameters are present.
The most robust and cost-effective long-term solution for detailed audience building and integration involves a combination of the Google Ads API, Google Analytics Data API, Looker Studio API, and webhooks from a tool like Metabase, all coordinated via Google Tag Manager (GTM) and a server-side tagging platform like Stape or Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
The long answer is:
To achieve your goal of retargeting users who visited your site via a specific UTM-tagged link from a non-digital campaign, you need to bridge the gap between your marketing signal (the UTM) and your audience platform (Google Ads).
The first crucial step is to ensure you have either the Google Ads Remarketing Tag or the Google Analytics 4 (GA4) Configuration Tag installed on your website, preferably managed via Google Tag Manager (GTM).
When a user lands on your site with the specific UTM parameters you set – say utm_source=radioutm_campaign=springpromo
You then create a custom GTM Trigger that only fires when both those parameters are present.
When that trigger fires, you set up a custom GTM Tag that sends an event to GA4, for example, a custom event called non_digital_promo_visit
By using GTM, you’re transforming the UTM data into a tracked event.
Once this data is in GA4, you can go into the GA4 interface and create a new Audience based on users who triggered the non_digital_promo_visit
Crucially, you must ensure that your Google Ads and GA4 accounts are linked.
After a day or so, this new audience will populate in Google Ads and can be used for your retargeting campaign.
For a more advanced, highly-scalable, and precise approach, server-side tracking using GTM and a platform like Stape or Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is ideal.
This setup improves data accuracy by resisting browser-side tracking prevention, and Stape, being a managed server-side environment, is generally far cheaper and easier to manage than a custom GCP setup for most small to medium businesses.
The combination of the Google Ads API for dynamically managing your retargeting lists, the Google Analytics Data API for pulling specific UTM-driven visit data, and the Looker Studio API for visualizing and validating your segments, provides a powerful integration framework.
For instance, if you had millions of visitors, you might use the Metabase API or webhooks to constantly monitor for new visitors with your UTM and then push those user IDs directly to a custom audience list managed through the Google Ads API.
This entire API-driven pipeline ensures you can build and update your retargeting segments with great precision and at high frequency, leveraging standard web events like page_viewnon_digital_promo_visit
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