In July of 2018, Google released parallel tracking to help decrease the load time of landing pages that send website visitors through redirects to obtain tracking. This new feature ensures that your website visitors land on your website sooner to prevent long load times and a potential loss of conversions.
Read Google's announcement here for more information on parallel tracking.
While CallRail does rely on tracking parameters to gather information about your callers, the tracking parameters we suggest don't cause any redirects on your ads. We've tested our tracking formula for both source and visitor tracking to ensure there's no loss of data when using parallel tracking.
Here's an article we wrote covering these changes.
How does this impact my call tracking with CallRail?
If you’ve set up URL parameters manually as a “Tracking Template” within Google Ads, you’ll continue to receive the same valuable data about your callers just as you did before Google released parallel tracking. If you’re using a different, third-party service outside of CallRail that adds URL parameters as a redirect for additional tracking, we recommend checking with that provider to ensure their redirects don’t impact CallRail or parallel tracking.
To ensure parallel tracking doesn’t impact your CallRail data, follow these instructions for adding a tracking template to your final URLs.
Note: Adding a tracking template at the account-level in Google is the method CallRail has always recommended; however, you can receive the same level of tracking by adding your ValueTrack parameters to the final URL suffix field as well.
Learn more about final URL suffixes with this Google help article.
Turning on Parallel Tracking in Google Ads
Parallel tracking is available now for Google Ads users who are using the newest version of Google Ads' interface.
Use this Google article to determine which Google Ads experience you're using.
Eventually, the option to turn parallel tracking on or off will be removed from Google’s interface, as parallel tracking will become the standard for all Google Ads accounts. In the meantime, if there aren’t redirects happening on your URLs, then your CallRail data shouldn’t be impacted by parallel tracking.
Here's how to turn parallel tracking on in your Google Ads account:
- Once you've logged into Google Ads, select the Google Ads account you'd like to update, then choose All Campaigns.
- Click Settings on the lefthand side of the page.
- Choose Account Settings at the top of the page.
- Expand the Tracking option and slide the toggle to "On" for "Parallel tracking."
- Click Save when finished.