Accurately tracking $$ converted from Shopping Ad campaign
EDIT: Looks like shopify has an app that connects your products to the google shopping center. Once connected to the “merchant center” tool with google you can easily run ads to your products. Theres a couple other things like optimizing your products so they can be displayed but your merchant center will give lots of data and (It seems) the $ return through your ads. I am just running one for the first time now, but it seems like that’s how this goes.
Hey friends,
Sorry for the rookie question. I am about to run a Google shopping ad campaign for the first time.
How do I track dollars spent by customers in relationship to my ad?
I am swimming through tag manager, merchant center and analytics right now trying to figure this out.
Shopify storefont, 1700ish items up. How do I track conversions accurately on google?
I can track “conversion actions” such as putting items in cart, but that doesn’t give me a dollar amount.
Thanks!
The short answer is:
The most accurate and robust way to track the dollar amount of purchases (conversion value) from your Google Shopping Ads on your Shopify store is by leveraging the Google Ads API or the Google Analytics Measurement Protocol for server-side event sending, paired with a robust data layer implemented via Google Tag Manager (GTM) and Stape for server-side container deployment.
While the Shopify Google & YouTube app offers a quick client-side setup that tracks conversion value, server-side tracking using your server GTM container, hosted by Stape, provides superior data resilience and accuracy by bypassing browser limitations like ad-blockers.
For a more direct and comprehensive approach, the Google Ads API or the Google Analytics Measurement Protocol (for events sent from GA4 to Google Ads) allows you to import conversions from your server, giving you full control over the data and preventing client-side data loss, which directly fixes the issue of tracking the actual dollar amount.
This is highly cost-effective as it maximizes the ROI of your ad spend by providing clean, actionable data for automated bidding strategies like tROAS.
The long answer is:
Your problem is a common challenge in eCommerce, where client-side tracking (tags firing directly from the customer’s browser) is vulnerable to data loss, leading to underreported revenue and inaccurate return on ad spend ($).
The solution involves moving your critical purchase conversion tracking to a server-side environment.
This is accomplished by using Google Tag Manager (GTM) for your web container to push accurate purchase data into the Data Layer on the Shopify checkout success page.
Then, a server GTM container, which you can host cost-effectively using a service like Stape on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or another cloud provider, receives this data stream.
Instead of the browser sending the conversion data directly to Google Ads, the server GTM container uses the Google Ads API or the Google Analytics Measurement Protocol to send a purchase event directly from your server to Google Ads.
Specifically, the purchase event sent via the Google Ads API includes the unique transaction ID and the full dollar value of the order, which is the exact “dollars spent by customers” you are trying to track.
By utilizing the server-side infrastructure, you ensure that even if a user is using an ad blocker or an intelligent tracking prevention feature, the purchase data is still securely and reliably transmitted to Google Ads.
This switch from client-side to server-side data submission is a huge leap in data quality.
Furthermore, you can implement Google Ads Enhanced Conversions by securely sending hashed first-party customer data (like email) along with the conversion.
This significantly improves conversion matching accuracy, further optimizing your Google Shopping campaigns and increasing the cost-effectiveness of your ad spend by making automated bidding more intelligent with a truer picture of your revenue.
As an added benefit, integrating your Shopify data with a data warehouse like BigQuery using the BigQuery API can centralize your analytics, allowing you to combine your campaign costs from the Google Ads API with your Shopify order data for sophisticated, custom ROI reporting outside of the standard Google Ads interface.
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