You may have noticed (organic) and (not set) values showing up where your Google Ads campaign name should be. According to Reddit and some Google help forums I’ve read, this started around June.
Some say it has something to do with Google deleting old Universal Analytics accounts, updates to attribution models, etc.
So, let’s see if you have this issue and what to do about it.
Do you have this issue?
First, you need to check if you have this issue at all. You have to have your GA4 and Google Ads accounts linked. Otherwise, we won’t be able to see any data.
Go to your GA4 account, click on Acquisition, then Traffic Acquisition.
- Change your dimension to session source/medium
- Add a second dimension campaign
- in the search field above them, enter google / cpc
You should see this:
Notice the (organic) value in the column where my campaign name should be, as in the second row. If you see this and if there is a lot of traffic in that (organic) row, you have this tracking issue and you need to solve it.
This is quite important if you want to analyze your campaigns in GA4. If you don’t, then maybe it’s not a big issue for you.
However, note that if you or someone else analyzes Google Organic traffic (not Google Ads), give them the heads up about this issue so that they won’t include this traffic in their reports.
Why it’s happening
I’ve tried to find some kind of a list of why it might be happening but I couldn’t. There is no official information from Google at the time of writing this post.
However, there are two known situations when this issue can arise.
Declining ad_user_data in the consent banner
These are the types of consent users can agree to or disagree with. When they don’t accept the one highlighted, we have no data passing from Google Ads.
Personalized ads turned off
In your MyAdCenter account, you can turn off personalized ads. Not sure how many users know about this, but turning it off, causes our issue in GA4.
There is a chance Google won’t fix any of this due to privacy issues. We know that they care about it a lot, but we also know that it is Google and they tend to find a way around any legal issue.
What can you do about it?
In the meantime, let’s try to solve it so you can go back to analyzing that data in your GA4 account. Basically, there is only one way to do it – add UTMs to your links.
It will take some time for the (organic) value to disappear as you will be using UTMs from a certain day. It won’t impact any data before UTMs.
Have that in mind when checking if it worked, and the issue is gone.
💡By the way, keep the auto-tagging enabled.
Add UTM tags manually
Just like you would track any other links, you can add UTM tags to each of your URLs, and it will be tracked in GA4. You can use this tool by Google to add UTMs.
This is what you should add to your final URL:
?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=your-campaignÂ
Obviously, change the last part for each campaign.
Using scripts to automate your work
I found this script on Github that would update your URLs with the correct UTMs. You don’t have to do anything. I haven’t tested it yet, so make sure you test it before launching.
It does the same thing as you would manually, except it inserts the appropriate campaign name, so you don’t have to.
Set the script to run at least daily so that all your URLs are tagged. If you’re making changes often, you can set it to run even hourly.
💡If you’re running some video ads or demand gen campaigns, the scripts do not support those campaign types. So, you will have to add UTMs manually.
It’s not an ideal solution, but it’s what we have right now.
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