500 dollar adwords tip

Today I learned something new!

Anyway, this is what happened...

I set up an adwords campaign today and had a little
redirect for my destination url where I was rotating urls
for some of my salespages.

it looked something like this: http://mydomain.com/rd/

I tested it in the browser and it worked fine. It wasn't
a regular redirect though. It was through a script that
I installed to track the clicks.

Anyway, I activated my campaign and started getting clicks
After about $500 spent I logged in to my statcounter account
to see how the traffic was acting on the site.

I didn't see any of the visitors that Google has sent me according
to the campaign stats! What the heck?!

I couldn't figure it out what was happening until I logged in to
my server to see the actual server stats.

Well, I noticed that Google adds this to each url clicked from their
search results and network: /?gclid=and some numbers here

Then I added that line to my redirect and found the reason why
I didn't see any visits. The damn redirect wouldn't work if that
code was added at the end of the url!!!! The only thing the visitors
saw was my login page to the script .... LOL

So I lost $500 and learned that from now on I will always click
my own ad after setting up the campaign to see if it works.