‘No Source’, ‘No Campaign’ or ‘No Terms’ being passed through in the Drilldown fields

If you are seeing leads come in with Channel = Paid Search but the Drilldown fields saying ‘No Source’ ‘No Campaign’ and ‘No Terms’ then it is likely that the ad that lead clicked on did not have UTM parameters behind it.

The most likely cause of this is that you have ‘Autotagging’ turned on in your Google Ads account and don’t have UTM parameters set up.

When you have Autotagging turned on, Google will append a unique number (known as the GCLID) to the URL of your ads. Google Analytics then picks up this unique number and communicates with Google Ads to get information on the associated ad (like the campaign name, ad group, etc). It then displays this information in your Google Analytics account.

As you can see in the rules for how Attributer categories visits, Attributer will use the presence of the GCLID parameter to determine that a particular lead has come from Paid Search, but unfortunately we aren’t able to communicate with Google Ads to get further information on the ad the lead clicked (no analytics tool besides Google Analytics is able to do so).

Because we can’t get any further information from the GCLID, and because there were no UTM parameters present, we write ‘No Source’ ‘No Campaign’ and ‘No Terms’ into the Drilldown fields.

The fix is to add UTM parameters behind your ads and make sure the UTM’s you use match the rules that Attributer uses to categorise visits. Alternatively, you can use our recommended UTM parameters which follow UTM best practices and will work with Attributer’s rules.

If you’re unsure how to add UTM parameters to Google Ads, check out this video.