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I hope you're sitting comfortably, this could be a long one and loaded with questions! Cut to the chase:  Why is traffic from google product ads showing as 'organic' traffic in GA? Here's the scenario: Google Shopping I have thousands of products in a feed to google shopping (froogle, google base, google merchant, whatever you like to call it, I'll settle for google shopping for the purpose of this question). The URLs of this feed is tagged with GA tracking data (notably utm_source=GoogleBase&utm_medium=Product-Search), I have also tagged this with internal tracking which comes through in the back-end to assign orders to that specific source.  In this case 'GOOGLEBASE'. Adwords Product Listing Ads As you know, a new (ish) feature of adwords pulls in your products from google shopping so that you get a richer ad (image, title, price) and displays this in the 'advert section' of the SERP. Once setting up a few of these, I noticed I was getting a fair amount of traffic for these new ads, taking one example, which resided in a relatively specific ad group (advertising Aviation Snips). Naturally, I wanted to find out which keywords were driving that traffic in order to improve the ads, or kill them if they weren't working. What was interesting is that I can't find anything about that traffic anywhere in adwords or google analytics.  254 clicks to 'aviation snips' must show up somewhere in analytics, if not the keywords, then what about the product? Analytics is showing nothing like that quantity of visits to those product landing pages where you'd expect.  It's like ghost traffic. Google Analytics Since experimenting with product listing ads the organic traffic in GA has suddenly shot up, looking at the new keywords they are all queries which when I test them show up product listing ads in the SERP so it's obviously the paid listing ads driving this traffic. Why is google reporting these as organic, rather than paid? I also noticed a keyword appear as * in the PAID segment of analytics.  I thought this was my missing aviation snips traffic, but digging into the landing pages for the * keyword, they are many different ones. There's a connection between the * and product listing ads, but what is it? Is the traffic being doubly reported? Back End Meanwhile we've seen an increase for orders tagged in the back-end of GOOGLEBASE which makes sense - google are pulling in my google shopping feed into the paid part of the SERPs and these are generating sales. Here are some of my initial thoughts / theories: 1. When google pulls in google shopping results into the organic part of the SERP, these get reported as ORGANIC in google analytics, even if you've tagged them otherwise.  It seems they strip the tags out.  This makes it very difficult to know if your google shopping feed is working well, or if you are doing well on standard organic traffic. 2. Google isn't separating out traffic as PAID with their new product listing ads, completely skewing the reports.  It makes it look like you've gained great natural organic listings when if fact you are paying. 3. With relation to the missing Aviation Snips data - maybe google is showing a huge variety of products for that adgroup (even though it's specific) and therefore I can't see the traffic to the specific products that you'd expect.  This I'm most confused about and wondered if I've missed a trick in setting the product listing ads up? I've attached a couple of screenshots which I hope will help clarify some of this.  I can see product listing ads being great if you could get proper data to analyse and improve them. So here are my questions again if anyone can help? How do I see which keywords are driving the product listing ads? How do I see the landing pages for the product listings ads? What is the * keyword coming through in GA? How can you get GA to report product listing ads as paid rather than organic? Thank you so much.  If I can gather enough data on this all and work it out I'll try to write up in a blog post to help others. 0rOMM.png GUAE0.png fWPL7.png

I'm rewriting approximately 10,000 product descriptions, but for feasability it's useful to sometimes reuse some of the phrases that are there (and on other websites as they come straight from the manufacturer -eg. key features), how unique does the content have to be - are we talking 100%, 75%, 50% for it to be effective in google? Same question goes for the product title! Many thanks.