How to create a unique identifier for tracking?

How can Adwords campaign tracking parameters create wrong landingpages on Magento?

• We are currently running PPC campaigns for a client with a Magento shop. The campaigns had extremely high bounce rates. We discovered the following: The landingpage for an adgroup is e.g. http://www.client.com/landingpage1.html. However we are adding Adwords campaigntracking parameters like this in the PPC ads: http://www.client.com/landingpage1.html?utm_source=source1&utm_medium=medium1&utm_term=term1&utm_content=content1&utm_campaign=name1. We now discovered that in some cases this string with the url & the campaign tracking parameters causes the server to actually direct to a completely different page. So e.g. if you click on the ad with the destination url http://www.client.com/landingpage1.html?utm_source=source1&utm_medium=medium1&utm_term=term1&utm_content=content1&utm_campaign=name1 you actual get to see the page http://www.client.com/landingpage2.html. How is this possible and how can we fix this?

• Answer:

  The examples are a little hard to completely decipher. If you are using a tracking query string that also uses the same characters as your site may dynamically produce as part of the URLs there can be issues, usually resulting in a 404.  I have seen this when trying to send traffic to search result pages on a site. Both the search query result page (on the client's domain) and the tracking URLs used question marks (?) to distinguish and separate parameters. This was fixed by using ampersands (&) instead of ? on the first element of the URL tracking string.