Setting up Google Ads

Updated by Jing Lin

To populate your Paid Overview, Cost, ROAS (Return On Ad Spend) and Google Ads dashboards with data, you need to enable the Google Ads integration.

It can take up to 48 hours for the data to show in the Dreamdata app once you successfully integrated it.
Setting up Google Ads
  1. In Dreamdata's main menu on your left side, click on Data Platform and then select "Sources".
  2. On the "Sources" page, select "Google Ads" under the Paid section.
  1. To enable the integration, click "Sign In with Google" (a new tab will open).
  2. Choose an account and sign in.
  3. Grant dreamdata.io access to manage your Adword campaigns. Click "Allow".
  4. Make sure relevant accounts are set to "Active" and click "Save".
  5. You're all set 🔥 It can take up to between 24 – 48 hours before data begins to appear in your Paid Overview, Cost, ROAS (Return On Ad Spend) and Google Ads dashboards.
What data do we get from Google Ads?

Daily campaign performance which contains daily cost, clicks, impressions (views for videos) for each campaign. Dreamdata will use all the historical data available for your plan.

Make sure that the user creating the integration has one of the following roles:

  • Admin
  • Standard
  • Read only

Tracking

1. Enable Auto-tagging

When running Google Ads, we recommend that you enable auto-tagging in your Google Ads account - It ensures that a gclid parameter is appended to all URLs. 

By correlating the gclid value with your Google Ads data, we can associate the click with the right Google Ads campaign, keywords and more. 

Fund out more about how to enable auto-tagging here.

2. Set up Tracking Template

If you wish to associate every Google Ads click with the right campaign, keyword and audience, we recommend the following steps which provide us and you with a richer data set and ensures that you don't have to rely only on the gclid.

  1. To minimize the problem we recommend adding UTM parameters to your Google Ads URLs. Google has added some dynamic parameters that you can use. Vie them here.
  2. In the below table you can see the url parameters we highly recommend adding.

Parameter

Examples

Comment

utm_source

google,youtube

The source of the click, typically either google or youtube.

utm_medium

cpc,cpm,display

The medium or type of campaign running.

utm_term

{keyword}

For Google Search Ads it's recommended setting the search keyword using a dynamic parameter.

campaign_id

{campaignid}

Setting the campaign_id parameter ensures that Dreamdata can associate the click with the right Google Ads Campaign.

Note: If this URL parameter is not set we also look for the campaign_id in the utm_campaign parameter.

ad_group_id

{adgroupid}

Setting the ad_group_id parameter ensures that Dreamdata can associate the click with the right Google Ad Group.

ad_id

{creative}

Setting the ad_id parameter ensures that Dreamdata can associate the click with the right Google Ad/Creative.

target

{targetid}

If you do Display or Youtube Ads the target ensured Dreamdata can do analytics on your Audiences so you can better understand which audiences generated the most revenue.

match_type

{matchtype}

Ensures Dreamdata can seperate Search Query and Keyword reporting by Match Type.

If Deamdata can associate a Google Ads Campaign to a visit or click then Dreamdate will set the utm_campaign to the name of the Campaign and therefore there is no need to set utm_campaign for Dreamdata to report with nice Campaign names. Ensure that URL parameters are added to all of your Google Ads by adding them to your tracking settings below.

Here is the value we recommend adding as your Tracking template:

{lpurl}?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_term={keyword}&campaign_id={campaignid}&ad_group_id={adgroupid}&ad_id={creative}&match_type={matchtype}&target={targetid}

You can customize it to your needs and you can also have multiple versions depending on how you structure your campaign setup.
If the tracking instructions above are not followed, attribution will be inaccurate and the Ad Account filter available in the performance reports will not work properly.


How did we do?