When you use auto-tagging with your Adwords campaign, all request that are generated by Google Adwords contain a ?glcid parameter in the Request. Adwords uses this to pass some information to Analytics for traffic analysis.
I was curious, about what data the gclid parameter contained. My guess was that it contained some encoded or encrypted information regarding the origin of the click, so I did some analysis on the clicks that I received. Some discussion about it was available on this post.
I ended up writing a quick PHP script that parses through an Apache log file. It finds requests that contain a gclid and then produces a report of which letters occur in which positions of the gclid.
The script is available for download here, and it generates a report like this:
Found 32507 appropriate lines
Character 1 [ 1] C
Character 2 [ 8] IJKLMNOP
Character 3 [32] -CDGHKLOPSTWX_abefijmnqruvyz2367
Character 4 [64] -CDEFG0ABHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ_abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz123456789
Character 5 [32] -_0ghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz123456789
Character 6 [32] -IJKLMNOPYZ_abcdefopqrstuv456789
Character 7 [32] -CDGHKLOPSTWX_abefijmnqruvyz2367
Character 8 [64] -ABCDEFG0HIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ_abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz123456789
Character 9 [32] 0-_ghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz123456789
Character 10 [ 4] JZp5
Character 11 [ 8] IMQUYcgk
Character 12 [ 1] C
Character 13 [ 1] F
Character 14 [10] QRSUWYZcde
Character 15 [61] -ABCEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ_ab0cdefghiklmnopqrstuvwxy123456789
Character 16 [63] -ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOQRSTUVWXYZ_abcde0fghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz123456789
Character 17 [17] DFGHIQabgiknrsx57
Character 18 [ 4] AQgw
Character 19 [ 1] o
Character 20 [ 1] d
Character 21 [64] -ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ_abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwx0yz123456789
Character 22 [32] ABCDEFGHQRSTUVWXghijklmnwyz0x123
Character 23 [64] -ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ_abcdefghijklmnopqrstuv0wxyz123456789
Character 24 [64] -ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ_abcdefghijklmnopqrs0tuvwxyz123456789
Character 25 [62] 0-ABCDEFHIJKLMOPQRSTUVWXYZ_abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz123456789
Character 26 [ 4] AQgw
This makes it clear that the parameter has some structure, but I’m still no closer to determining what it contains. Counting up the unique values, it would seem that they have about 95 bits of information available, which might be enough room to store everything it would need to know about the search that created it. Based on the reporting details in Analytics, I would presume that it somehow contains at least the following information:
- Campaign (id)
- Keyword (id)
- Ad Variation (id)
- Position
I did some research by clicking an ad multiple times and examining the glcids for those:
12345678901234567890123456
/?gclid=CNHz5eD_8pkCFRCdnAodzniYQg
/?gclid=CIX_u-X_8pkCFQKenAodlWprSg
/?gclid=CMyI_4OA85kCFRIhnAodc2_oRg
/?gclid=CO_0pYyA85kCFQghnAodDDpaRQ
/?gclid=CIXo9JeA85kCFRIhnAodc2_oRg
/?gclid=CLitgp2A85kCFQubnAod1nx7Qg
/?gclid=CN3_1aOA85kCFQghnAodDDpaRQ
/?gclid=CPyi1quA85kCFRabnAodWnZbRQ
/?gclid=COq-67OA85kCFRMhnAodyQvSRg
/?gclid=COOplrmA85kCFRCdnAodzniYQg
I noticed that most of the characters which use 32-64 characters vary quite a bit except for character #9, which was always an 8, and character #10 which was a ‘p’ for the first two clicks, and then a ‘5’ for all subsequent clicks. That likely has some significance, but I’m out of time for playing with it for now.
Hopefully the script and this basic analysis might be of use for somebody else to use in digging into it further.
One other thought that I had is that the data (or each field) is somehow encrypted and when you ‘link’ your Analytics account to your Adwords account it shares the decryption key so that it can get at the detail.