LinkCleanhttps://example.com/sale?gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=12345678&gclid=Cj0KCQ&utm_campaign=spring
After LinkCleanhttps://example.com/sale
gad_campaignid
Ad-click identifiers · Google Ads · introduced ~2023
What is gad_campaignid?
Why a campaign ID needed to live in the URL
Universal Analytics depended on the GA cookie and on referrer headers to attribute campaigns. Both have become unreliable under modern browser-privacy regimes (Safari Intelligent Tracking Prevention, Firefox Total Cookie Protection, Chrome Privacy Sandbox). GA4's design moved more of the attribution signal into first-party URL tags — the gad_* family is part of that shift.
gad_campaignid sits alongside the human-readable utm_campaign and the legacy gclid, giving Google Ads three different ways to bind a click to a campaign: utm_campaign for the GA dashboard, gad_campaignid for first-party numeric attribution, gclid for the Ads-side conversion record.
How LinkClean removes it
Default-on. Same default-on treatment as gclid, gad_source, gbraid, wbraid.
Frequently asked
Does gad_campaignid duplicate utm_campaign?
Almost — but utm_campaign is the human-readable string the marketer typed, gad_campaignid is the numeric identifier Google generates. Two views of the same campaign, both meant for different downstream tools.
Why three campaign identifiers on one URL?
Different audiences read different tags. utm_campaign for the publisher's GA4 dashboard, gad_campaignid for Google Ads' first-party attribution, gclid for the Ads conversion record.
Clean tracking on iPhone, in one tap.
LinkClean strips ~80 vendor-specific tracking parameters from any link, from any app's share sheet — and preserves functional ones like hl, t (YouTube timestamp), and q (search). No account, on-device.
