Hi Everyone,
Just had a meeting this morning with a guy from our Analytics company. Basiclally I want to begin tagging some campaigns we are running for our website, however they way its done is like so:

This isn't an exact url but rather an example:

http://theirsite.com/?campaignid=googlePPC&url=example.com/index.html

Currently our Google Ads point to Example Web Page

So in essence we are changing our urls in our account to point to our analytics companies site which then redirects the user to our landing page.

I asked if this will affect Google's Quality Score and his answer was no, but I am wondering if anyone has first hand experience or where I might be better off asking about this?

Dave is your man for this, but I thought that target URLs couldn't go through a redirect?

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Search Engine Optimisation - Red Cardinal Internet Marketing
Internet Consultant Ireland | Search Engine Optimisation Services
Catering Company Dublin - My sister's handmade canape company!

Once its redirected the link no longer counts - it is easy to see from Google web master tools - in there they will show when they last detected the url - the date will just not change - no link after a while.

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Camino de Santiago - DeadFly SEO - West Highland Way - Glendalough - Work in Ireland

Heh? Maybe I'm gone mad, but isn't this discussion over an Adwords target URL?

Brain dead - ignore me...

This actually depends.

Most AdWords affiliate marketers use landing pages now as opposed to "direct to merchant" because of the quality score. Sending through a redirect WILL impact your QS and usually in a negative way.

HOWEVER, for some reason, the AdWords bot CAN follow some redirects (trying to work this out still) and can sometimes give the alternative LP a better QS.

What analytics company is this? If they told you for sure that it wont effect your QS, get it in writing because it certainly will. Do they HAVE to do a URL redirect to track?

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Web Design | Search Engine Marketing | Pay Per Click Management

Yes I agree with you, I'm sure that it certainly can affect the Quality Score hence the reason I asked him and hence the reason I'm asking here.

I know for one of my clients in Australia we did something of the sort and basically I contacted Google to let them know what we were doing and why and they said, we will accept this exception this time.

I can contact Google here in Ireland as they have now said we have an active account manager so I think I should raise the issue with them.

The site stat package is Nedstat (apparently quite large in Europe). The stats package captures the data when the user is directed to their server and then redirects the user through to our website.

As I said I was reassured it won't affect my quality score, but we have many many keywords that are less than €0.05 cent and I don't want to compromise our traffic due to tracking.