UTMs in Product Feeds | Organic vs Shopping Ads
I’m having a problem with a store in terms of shopping listings attribution.
The client has set UTMs in the product feed for each product, that are medium=googleshopping and term=googleshopping.
But because of that on Google Ads the landing pages for Shopping Ads also have these utms in them.
And as the conversions are coming from GA, the Shopping campaign has 0 conversions.
I believe this is wrong, because the conversions are not getting through Analytics as being from Shopping Ads, but as normal organic listings (there’s no cpc utm nowhere).
So, what should be done to get the utms right in the shopping ads? Should the product feed have no utms?
The short answer is:
The product feed should have no UTMs for your Shopping Ads to correctly attribute conversions, or at a minimum, should not include parameters like medium or term that conflict with Google Ads’ own tracking mechanisms.
Your current setup forces Google Analytics to classify the traffic as a non-paid source (medium=googleshopping and term=googleshopping) instead of the correct Google Ads (CPC) source, leading to zero conversions reported in the Shopping campaign.
The ideal solution involves removing the problematic UTMs from the feed and ensuring auto-tagging is enabled in Google Ads.
Auto-tagging automatically appends a unique gclid (Google Click ID) to the final URL, which Google Analytics uses to import the correct paid attribution data, including campaign and keyword, making the conversion visible and correctly attributed within Google Ads.
This approach is highly cost-effective as it requires no custom tracking setup or additional tools.
The long answer is:
The core problem is that the UTM parameters hardcoded in your Google Merchant Center product feed’s final landing page URLs are overriding the superior, more accurate tracking information provided by Google Ads.
When a user clicks on a Shopping Ad, Google Ads is designed to automatically append a unique parameter called the gclid to the landing page URL, a process known as auto-tagging.
This gclid is the critical link Google Analytics needs to correctly import and attribute the click as paid traffic, specifically to the exact Shopping campaign, ad group, and product ad.
The presence of your manual UTMs, particularly medium=googleshopping and term=googleshopping, causes Google Analytics to prioritize these parameters, classifying the session as a custom or organic channel (as there is no Cost Per Click or CPC marker), thereby breaking the link back to the Shopping Ad.
To fix this and restore accurate attribution, you must remove all manual UTM parameters from the product feed’s final landing page URLs.
The product feed should only contain the clean, base URL for each product.
Once the UTMs are removed, you must ensure that auto-tagging is enabled within your Google Ads account settings.
This allows Google Ads to append the gclid automatically.
When the user lands on the page, the Google Analytics tracking code on your site reads the gclid and sends it along with the conversion event data back to Google, ensuring the Shopping campaign gets full credit for the conversion.
This integration is seamless and utilizes the underlying data flow between Google Ads and Google Analytics.
Furthermore, for advanced analysis, you should consider using the Google Analytics Data API to pull rich, attributed conversion data into a platform like BigQuery or Looker Studio, which can then be combined with your product data using the Merchant API to create powerful, granular reports that clearly delineate the performance of your paid Shopping campaigns versus organic traffic, providing a complete and cost-effective solution for reporting accuracy.
This eliminates the need for any custom server-side tracking via Google Tag Manager and Stape or Google Cloud Platform, as the primary conversion tracking flow is maintained through Google’s native auto-tagging infrastructure.
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