Google Parallel Tracking – All questions answered

Talking about human nature, people get riled by the late responses made by anything or anyone. In the same way, this also implies on websites. And because of which the percentage of your bounce rate increases. According to a study by RocketFuel the most average bounce rates fall between 26% and 70% for most websites.

To reduce this percentage and to make your landing page load faster a google mechanism was introduced last year on 30th October 2018 called “Google Parallel Tracking” which was enabled for search and shopping campaigns on most browsers. Option for display campaign has also started since May 1, 2019, and it is said that it will start for video campaigns in later 2019.

Google Parallel tracking is a way to click or load tracking URLs offered by means of Google, which speeds web page load time with the aid of 3-party trackers in the background than redirecting the user.Adding this to your campaign customer is directly diverted to the landing page rather than URL tracking.

It is a magical tracking mechanism for a website, After adding Google parallel tracking to a campaign, It is seen in most cases that the load time of a website decreased and the conversion rate  increased that too without wasting much in ad spend and the ROI increases

Comparison of Google Parallel Tracking and Traditional Tracking

As we know including Google Parallel tracking to our campaigns will shorten our term of loading a webpage and will also reduce the share of the bounce rate for a website. But do you know how?

With Traditional Tracking, when a user clicks on the ad, firstly Google ad tracker will start loading after that tracking URL will load with an addition to it, possible additional tracking URL loads and after all this process customers are diverted to your landing page.

But when talking about Google Parallel Tracking, the moment when a user clicks on the ad, they are directly diverted to the landing page. And at the same time, clicks’ measurement or URL tracking request runs in the background.

Without Google Parallel Tracking customers have to wait for page load because of tracking URLs, by this chance of bounce rate for a website also increases. Thus, to avoid this delay, Google introduced this feature in ad campaigns.

How to use parallel tracking?

1. Sign in to your Google Ads account.
2. In the navigation menu, click All campaigns.
3. In the page menu on the left, click Settings.
4. Click Account Settings.
5. Click Tracking.
6. Click the switch next to “Parallel tracking” to turn it on.

What do you need to enable parallel tracking?

Here are a few things that you need to have before you start using Google Parallel Tracking.

HTTPS:  It is the extended version of HTTP where S stands for Secure. Which means that all the connection between our website and browser are encoded. To keep everything consistent and clean parallel tracking make sure to add this protocol in their tracking template.

Ad Changes:  The ad delivery will be paused, and the process of review will be initiated if one tries to make changes in the ads themselves. To make initiation of the review process in the background and allowing the ads to still perform unless indicated, then we should switch to higher-level changes (ad group, campaign, account, etc.).

AdWords Editor:  While using the AdWords tool, make sure that you use the updated version so, that uploaded changes don’t affect previously made URL changes or the changes made with parallel tracking.

GCLID:  Google Click Identifier is a unique tracking parameter which is used by Google to transfer information between Google ads account and Google Analytics account. Make sure the GCLID is still being added and use auto-tagging to accomplish this. 

Testing Campaigns Ahead of the Switch: 

To make sure the templates are compatible, test individual campaigns before rolling the change to the entire account.

This can be done under the campaign>settings>campaign URL option.

There is no need for you to use custom parameter {_beacon} in any of your URL’s. if Google finds out this parameter, then all clicks under that campaign will get parallel tracking treatment. And always verify that parallel tracking is enabled by looking for &gb=1 in your tracking calls.

Conclusion:

Adding Google Parallel Tracking to your website will give you higher conversion rates. In results, there will be less on ad spent and ROI will increase. Using this mechanism in your campaigns will decrease the chances of people diverting to other websites. It will become user interactive and hence consumer will not jump to other webpages.

Observe all the changes for a few months and see the positive impacts on your campaigns. It will surely give you an improved bounce rate and higher traffic as compared before.