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Cloudbeds answers · Google Ads

Does the Google Ads click ID get lost when my site redirects to hotels.cloudbeds.com?

By Giuseppe Gaspari, founder. Updated October 2026.

Fifteen-plus years running paid search and conversion tracking for tourism and lodging operators. Full bio

The short answer

Only if nothing carries it across. Google documents a fix: the Conversion Linker, with Enable linking across domains on and your Cloudbeds domain listed, adds _gl to the Book Now link, and the Linker on the booking engine reads it back. GA4 also needs your domain and cloudbeds.com under Configure your domains. On a live property we manage, the click ID survived the jump and Google Ads attributes bookings to campaigns, so set it up and test yours with one booking.

Why

A Google Ads click lands on your site with a click ID in the URL. The hosted booking engine lives on a different domain, so without a linker the click ID stays behind and the booking arrives as a cold visitor. That's the whole basis of the "lost gclid" claim. And the fix Google documents is the cross-domain linker, not a server you rent.

We checked this on a live Cloudbeds property we manage in October 2026. With a test click ID on the landing page, the Book Now link picked up a _gl parameter on click, and decoding it gave back that same click ID. On the same property, GA4 credits 55 of 142 booking-engine purchases to google / cpc with the campaign name, and Google Ads attributes about 90 bookings a month through its imported GA4 purchase. That property runs both the GA4 connection and GTM, so the steps below are still how you prove it on yours.

How to check it

  1. 1

    In GA4: Admin, Data streams, Configure tag settings, Configure your domains. Add your domain and cloudbeds.com (Contains), then add cloudbeds.com to List unwanted referrals. Cloudbeds recommends this in its Connect Google Analytics article.

  2. 2

    In your GTM container, confirm a Conversion Linker tag fires on All Pages with cross-domain linking on and hotels.cloudbeds.com (or us2.cloudbeds.com) listed. The free template in the GA4 guide has it built.

  3. 3

    Confirm the same container ID is in Cloudbeds under Settings, Booking Engine, Analytics, GTM connection, so the Linker also runs on the booking engine.

  4. 4

    Click your own ad once, go to the booking engine, and check the URL for _gl=. Make a refundable test booking, then watch for the conversion in Google Ads over the next day or two.

Read the full guide

Sources

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