Upload Data About Conversions

When a customer completes a pre-defined action on an advertiser's website, such as purchasing an item or requesting more information, Search Ads 360 reports a conversion.

Conversions for some advertisers start online and finish offline. For example, a consumer initiates research online for a purchase, clicks on an ad, and then telephones a call center to complete the purchase. Or a consumer with a smartphone taps a “call now” button in an ad and purchases an item over the telephone. For these conversions, Search Ads 360 will automatically have data about the online portion. If you want to provide data about the offline portion—to enhance reports, for use in automated rules, or for optimization in a bid strategy—you can upload it to Search Ads 360.

In some cases, you might need to modify the value of an existing conversion. For example, you might edit a conversion value to account for discounts that were applied after an online purchase was made (such as a mail-in-rebate), returns that occurred with a restocking fee, or credits that were applied after the purchase.

After you've set up your client app as described in My First App (including activating the conversion service), you can send the following conversion-related requests to the Search Ads 360 API:

Get

Returns conversions that match criteria you specify.

Insert

Adds new conversions.

Update

Modifies existing conversions.

Synchronous Requests

All conversion requests are synchronous. You can make parallel synchronous requests (up to your project's limit) in a single client.

Search Ads 360 IDs and Conversions

Because conversions need to be attributed to a specific campaign, ad, keyword, and optionally to a visit, each conversion specifies the Search Ads 360 ID of an ad, keyword, and campaign, along with the IDs of the parent objects in the Search Ads 360 hierarchy. When you get, add, or update a conversion, you'll need to specify most of these IDs in the request.

Obtaining Search Ads 360 IDs

To find these IDs, do any of the following:

  • Use the Search Ads 360 UI to download a report that contains IDs for the advertiser, engine accounts, campaigns, ad groups, keywords, and ads.

  • Add Search Ads 360 macros such as CampaignID and TrackerID to your landing page URLs. When a customer clicks an ad, each macro will instruct Search Ads 360 to pass its ID to the advertiser's landing page as URL parameter. You can retrieve these IDs from the advertiser's web logs and use them in your Conversion requests.

    Search Ads 360 provides a few different macros for sending keyword IDs to a landing page. To attribute conversions to a keyword, you'll need to add the TrackerID macro to the landing page URLs.

Click IDs

A click ID tracks a click on an ad, and you can use it to attribute a conversion to a specific visit instead of providing the entire hierarchy of IDs for Search Ads 360 objects. Search Ads 360 will use the click ID to find and attribute the appropriate keyword and ad.

Click IDs are case-sensitive, so make sure your web logs and tracking software do not change the case of the click ID.

Generating a Click ID

Either Search Ads 360 or Google Ads generates the click ID.

If auto-tagging is enabled in an Google Ads account, Google Ads generates a click ID when an ad is shown. As a result, if a user clicks on a particular ad impression multiple times, those clicks will be associated with only one click ID. Landing page visits for the exact same impression will share the same click ID.

Search Ads 360 can generate a click ID if you activate the conversion API service. If a click is redirected from Google Ads and Google Ads has already generated a click ID, Search Ads 360 uses the Google Ads ID instead of generating a new one. If a click is redirected from another type of supported engine, Search Ads 360 generates the ID.

Click ID Parameters

Each click ID consists of two parameters. For example:

gclid=CJjsqefUkAJSHDJ_gPdDiEAAA&gclsrc=ds

The gclid parameter contains a case-sensitive ID for the click. Search Ads 360 maintains the attribution information (such as keyword, ad, campaign, ad group) for each click ID generated.

The gclsrc parameter indicates the source of the click ID. Currently, it can have one of the following values:

  • gclsrc=ds: the click ID was generated by Search Ads 360. In addition, the click was either on an engine other than Google, or the click was on Google but the Google Ads account is not using auto-tagging.

  • gclsrc=aw.ds: the click ID was generated by Google Ads that is using auto-tagging, and the click went through the Search Ads 360 clickserver.

  • gclsrc=: the parameter is empty if the click ID was generated by Google Ads, but the conversion API service was not enabled in Search Ads 360 when the click occurred.