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usefathom / fathom

Fathom Lite. Simple, privacy-focused website analytics. Built with Golang & Preact.
https://usefathom.com/
MIT License
7.52k stars 364 forks source link

decode gclid values? #357

Open missinglink opened 2 years ago

missinglink commented 2 years ago

hi team,

we're a customer of your SaaS offering and I just noticed a potential feature improvement when using Google Ads "Smart Campaigns", they don't append UTM params to campaigns, instead adding a ?gclid querystring param to clicks.

a quick search shows that the param value is a Procotol Buffer encoded string, I assume Google Analytics transparently decodes this value and uses the contents in place of UTM for tracking, Fathom currently ignores it.

so it might be that this is a secret Google thing and only applicable to google connected services, but some smart people have attempted to reverse engineer the contents and I was wondering if there was any value in attempting to do something similar in Fathom?

Daniel15 commented 11 months ago

The linked articles are 10 years old now... Are they still relevant?

I wouldn't rely on the format of the gclid remaining the same. It's an internal implementation detail for Google and could change at any time.