Google Ads tracking tags

Tracking is a very important part of seeing success in Google Ads. Fortunately, and unfortunately, tracking options have gotten more complex over the last few years. That means while you have lots of options to customize your tracking setup, you also have many opportunities to make mistakes that could cause your campaign tracking to be accurate.

Now with Multifeeds you can quickly add tracking tags to your Shopify store with ease and meet the requirements of various Google's programs including enhanced conversion tracking, Google Automated Discounts, etc. These tags include conversion tracking tag, and remarketing tag.

Conversion tracking tags

A conversion tracking tag track an event that could typically set as a "goal" in your ecommerce funnel. The most typical one is the "purchase" event that measure purchases. However depends on your target, conversion tracking tags can also measure other "micro" conversion actions.

For example in early phase of the campaigns you might want to optimize the campaigns based on the "add_to_cart" events instead of "purchase", as number of "add_to_cart" events will be much more than the number of "purchase", providing more sensible data for Google to crunch. After a couple of weeks when the campaigns get more traction and Google has enough insights of your products and potential audience, you could switch to the "purchase" conversion action. One could also consider "begin_checkout" event which is between the "add_to_cart" and the "purchase" events in the funnel.

Remarketing tag

Unlike conversion tracking tags which are used to track a single event (typically with a monetary value), remarketing tags track various activities of a potential customer on your Shopify store, providing valuable insights to Google Ads so it can later on show effective remarketing advertisements to the same customer when he/she surf the internet.

Typical tracked activities include

Google tags group

Multifeeds organize Google tags in groups, each typically connected to a specific Google Ads account. Tags in a group could also share some localization settings, including the format of item IDs in the feed, or market specific tracking.

Why connecting a Google Ads account?

By connecting a Google Ads account to a tag group, you could have Multifeeds automatically create and configure a conversion action in Google Ads corresponding to the tag installed in your Shopify store. The tag and the conversion action then works hand in hand automatically, helping you avoid going through the time consuming and error-prone process of creating conversion action.

Item ID matters

When creating product feeds, you have configured to use a specific item identification scheme. The identification of items in the feeds must match the item ids being fired in the tags, or the tags would be useless.

The itemID in the tags could be set to the Item ID or the Item group ID

Some common Item ID formats:

• shopify_XX_{product_id}_{variant_id}. XX is a 2-letter country code. This format is used by the Google Youtube channel app.
• {product_id}_{variant_id}
• {variant_id}
• {sku}

Item group ID:

• {product_id}

Most feed apps use the product ID as the item group ID as in Shopify, variants of a product is a native equivalence to the item groups in Google Shopping. Because of this the Item identification in the tags are set to use Product ID by default.

However there are cases where one may have variants of different products belonging to same item group in Google Shopping, so item group ID must be set to something in common instead of the product_id.

The Item identification can also be set to use a custom template, in which you can interleave different tokens with text to create the desired ID format

Market specific tracking

Shopify markets make it extremely easy for merchants to go international by providing multiple localized versions of the storefront. However it also creates a challenge to make sure that statistics of a market does not skew the others. By default, a tag is set to fire on all localized versions of the storefront. To track specific market, use Market specific tracking settings.

Specific currency

Select this option to limit the tags to fire only on pages that the currency is available. In fact, except for the page_view event which could fire on special pages that don't have currency data, all other events are tracked with currency.

Specific URL pattern

This option is helpful if you have dedicated domain/subdomain or URL subpath for different markets. Do note that in case of URL subpath, the checkout page has a different pattern and shared between all markets, so you might want to turn on the Whitelist checkout page so the tags are fired when the URL matches OR when the visitor is on the checkout page regardless of the market.

For example, a store could have 2 storefronts

• fr.mystore.com that are selling to France, with products listed in EUR
• us.mystore.com that are selling to USA, with products listed in USD

Advertising in the 2 markets could be delegated to 2 different agencies, each use a different Google Ads account. Obviously you don't want statistics on the French site to be recorded on the US ads account and vice-versa. To achieve that, a settings like below could be setup

FR tag group

• Connected to the French ads account
• set to fire only on France market
  • currency set to EUR and/or
  • url to contain fr.mystore.com

US tag group

• Connected to the US ads account
• set to fire only on USA market
  • currency set to USD and/or
  • url to contain us.mystore.com