There exists some concern that bucketing Google Shopping traffic while testing in Convert might lead to receiving penalties from Google, as the visitor might see a different price point than the one displayed on the Google Shopping ad placements. So, avoiding to bucket these visitors onto the test
To prevent Google Shopping traffic from being bucketed into an experiment, we need to identify the traffic that is coming into the site via the Audience targeting in Convert.
We can do this by using several methods:
- Identify Google Traffic Source and Exclude it. We can also do this in two ways:
- Add UTM tags to the product links that you add to your Google Shopping placements and identify them in Convert through a Convert Custom Audience.
You could add a parameter like utm_source=google_shopping. So your links you end up looking like https://www.domain.com/category/productname.html?utm_source=google_shopping.
Then add the condition to your Convert Custom Audience.
That should exclude any traffic with that utm_source=google_shopping parameter. - If you are unable to modify the URL parameters, you can configure the audience as part of a segment and exclude them based on the referrer URL. For that, you will need to create a JS Condition within your Custom Audience and exclude that traffic.
The JS Condition can be something like:
!(document.referrer.includes('google.com'))
And can be configured like:
The only caveats with this solution is that it will exclude all the traffic that comes from Google, so the first one is a better one.
- Add UTM tags to the product links that you add to your Google Shopping placements and identify them in Convert through a Convert Custom Audience.