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Trying to figure out how to track conversions for ad clicks. I currently send GCLID to Google Analytics 4, but have no way of telling whether GA4 will pick it up as an ad-based conversion and send it to Google Ads. (On the Google side, I have GA4 linked to Google Ads with key events marked as conversion actions.)

Here’s my setup: when a user arrives on the site with a gclid in the URL, I store the gclid in a cookie. After they sign up for a free trial and finish the onboarding (inside the web app), I send a “New Signup” event from the server to Segment with the user’s email and gclid from the cookie. Then I have a Google Analytics 4 Cloud destination set up like this:

I have no idea if this will work though, since Google doesn’t provide a mechanism for actually testing ad clicks. Do I have the mapping set up correctly?

I also played around with the Google Ads Conversion destination. My understanding is that it’s a way of bypassing Google Analytics and sending conversions directly to Google Ads. I hesitated on enabling it though, because I don’t know what type of data and insights I’d be missing out on.

Hey Ege,

It looks like a support ticket was opened on the same topic. Please be sure to reference it for full details.

 

In order to provide some more context for other readers, here's a quick overview:

We currently recommend implementing a GA4 Cloud Destination client-side through gtag. In this case, make sure that the Client ID generated by GA4 client-side is passed server-side. More info on this here. You can pass your UTM parameters as Event parameters or User parameters, but this will not allow you to use default GA4 dimensions. However, you can create custom dimensions.

As a note, the GA4 Web Destination supports full GA4 functionality, including device-specific information, demographics, geolocation data, etc.

Cheers!

First - Definitely do NOT pass email to GA4.  That is against GA4 policy to store PII.

Second - if you have the GCLID I would send as an offline conversion to GAds, and in all Google-li-ness, email can be sent to GAds for Google to match in their blackbox.

Third - if you want to send the same event to GA4 via server side (Measurement Protocol), then you will need to pass the device id (for web that is the client_id, for firebase the app_instance_id); in addition, send the session_id if you want to merge on a current session.

All in all, if the goal is to attribute and to optimize ad campaigns, then I would send the event to GAds as an offline conversion.  With the GCLID you have what google needs to see the majority of values.  If you are doing additional analysis in GA4, then GCLID means nothing in GA4 but the device_id means everything… that is the id you need to send with your GA4 event mapping.   If you have a User ID, you could also match on that value, but be aware of the caveats that could present. (too many to describe in a post).

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