One of the new Google Tag Manager enhancements, the Conversion Linker can be described as a cookie update process that enables tracking of ad click data through first-party cookies.
In a typical conversion process, users who are exposed to an ad and click on the relevant ad will see the landing page1 associated with the ad upon arrival. Usually, the page’s URL2 will be set to include information related to the ad click. That’s where the Conversion Linker comes into play. When a user completes a conversion event such as a page view, click, or view, the Conversion Linker will associate the ad click data with the conversion event triggered by the ad click that brought the user to your site.
Using the Conversion Linker
The setup for the Conversion Linker is extremely simple: you just need to select the Conversion Linker in the Google Tag Manager tag configuration section. The key thing to keep in mind is that the Conversion Linker must be triggered on all landing pages defined within the ads.
For example, if your ad campaigns use specific landing pages, you can configure the Conversion Linker in Tag Manager to trigger only on those specific pages. However, if you’re following a different strategy—such as having conversions occur across all pages of your site after an ad click—the Conversion Linker triggering on all pages becomes a more appropriate solution.
The conversion tracking tag comes with a standard definition format and, except in special cases, requires no additional configuration. In special cases, specific requirements related to cookie records should be evaluated.
You can find support for Google Tag Manager here.
Reorganizing Conversion Tracking Cookie Settings
Except in cases where the tag’s basic setup is sufficient for triggering on pages, you can customize the Name,, Domain, and Path. By default, the conversion tracking tag places advertising click data into cookies named _gcl_aw and _gcl_dc at the top-level domain and root path. However, if you do not wish to use click data from one subdomain for conversion tracking on another subdomain, you may need to disable the cookie settings. In another scenario, you may wish to evaluate your created cookie sets across different advertising campaigns and subdomains. In such cases, you can adjust the cookie definitions via variable definitions.
Disabling Cookie Settings
If you are certain of the required configuration, you can view the options (linker options) that define the cookie values.
Name
This is the prefix used in cookie definitions and defaults to _gcl. For example, if you change the name definition to _gcl2, the conversion tracking tag will create cookies named _gcl2_aw and _gcl2_dc.
The same adjustments must be made in the relevant services. For example, for ad conversion tracking tags that read data from these cookies, the same prefix must also be defined.
Domain
Assume the website is blog.ornekwebsitesi.com. In this case, the conversion linker tag will set the cookie domain to ornekwebsitesi.com. This is because the conversion linker tag by default targets the highest-level domain. However, if different ads are being served for different subdomains, independent configurations will be required. In such a case, limiting cookies to a more specific subdomain would be appropriate.
Path
By default, the cookie path is set to the root directory /. If you wish to restrict cookies to a subdirectory under a domain, you will need to adjust the path accordingly.
*[Conversion Linker]: Conversion Linker