What is a gclid?

The gclid for gyms

Look at the address bar after clicking a Google ad and you will see it: ?gclid= followed by a long string of letters and numbers. That string is one click. Google generated it, knows which campaign, ad group, keyword and device it belongs to, and will recognize it if it comes back later attached to a conversion. It is the cleanest possible join between an ad and a person.

For a gym that is the whole game. The member does not pay on the website; they pay weeks later at the front desk. If the gclid was captured when they enquired and stored against their record, the payment can be sent to Google with that gclid attached, and Google credits the exact click. If it was not captured, the click and the member are strangers forever.

Why the pixel must see it: the gclid only exists in the browser on the landing page, in the URL. Something on that page has to read it and keep it before the visitor navigates away, fills in a form or closes the tab. A redirect that drops the query string, a link shortener, a form on a different domain: any of those and the gclid is gone before anything saw it. Auto-tagging, the Google Ads setting that adds the gclid, has to be on. See Google Ads conversion tracking for the rest of the setup.

One limit: a gclid covers Google clicks only. Members who came from Meta carry an fbclid instead, and members who phoned carry neither, which is where the email and phone match takes over.

How Adsu uses the gclid

The Adsu pixel on your landing pages reads the gclid, along with the campaign identifiers in the Final URL suffix, and stores it with the visit. When the same person enquires, the visit and the enquiry are joined, so the booking, the show and the payment that follow inherit the gclid. Adsu counts verified stages only: if a stage cannot be verified, it is not counted. Every report is one line per campaign per location.

Adsu credits the last eligible touch inside the 30 days before the payment. Booked, showed and paid go back to Google as offline conversions and to Meta through the Conversions API. Google matches the gclid to the click, credits the campaign and keyword, and its bidding learns from members.

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