Tracking URLs and URL templates

If your search engine accounts use an additional tracking solution that requires you to redirect clicks to a tracking URL, define the tracking URL in a URL template.

You can specify the tracking URL at any level. That is, if all ads in a search engine account use the same tracking URL, you can specify the tracking URL in the engine account's template. Otherwise, specify the tracking URL in a template at a lower level.

If you use tracking URLs in an account that supports shared templates, you're required to define the tracking URLs in a URL template. In other engine accounts, you can include tracking URLs directly in landing page URLs or in a URL template.

HTML encoding

The additional tracking system you're redirecting to may require you to encode (escape) your landing page URLs. Typically, anything that is encoded will be passed to your site, and anything that is unencoded will be passed to the tracking service and not passed on to your site. For example, you may want Search Ads 360 to redirect to a tracking URL that looks like this:
https://example.tracker.com?c_id=123&t_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.myproduct.com%3Fp_id%3D42%26campaign%3DSpeedyShoes-Brand%26keyword%3D123456%26src%3D55

In this case, create a URL template like this:
https://example.tracker.com/?c_id=123&t_url={escapedlpurl}%26campaign%3D[*Campaign*]%26keyword%3D[*KeywordID*]%26src%3D{param2}

Note that the URL template specifies the {escapedlpurl} placeholder and encodes the URL parameters.

The {escapedlpurl} placeholder encodes the landing page URL for you, so your landing page URL can look like this:
https://www.myproduct.com?p_id=42

Most tracking services would end up redirecting to this URL:
https://www.myproduct.com?p_id=42&campaign=SpeedyShoes-Brand&keyword=123456&src=5