Google Ads Tracking Shopify : Help
Hi,
Since I installed desynchronize the merchant center feed from my google shopify channel I lost google ads tracking. The google application is still installed but I just disconnected the merchant center feed because I installed synprosis. Do you know why this had an effect on my tracking?
Detailsidentifying_conversionsLocked
The short answer is:
Why did disconnecting the Shopify Merchant Center feed break Google Ads tracking?
Your Google Ads tracking was likely lost because the official Shopify “Google & YouTube” app’s conversion tracking mechanism is intimately tied to its connection and data flow to Google Merchant Center, which includes automatic placement of the necessary Google tag event snippets for conversions like Purchase on your Shopify store, usually utilizing the Google Ads Conversion API internally.
When you desynchronized the Merchant Center feed to use Synprosis, you may have inadvertently disabled or corrupted the built-in conversion tracking component managed by the native app, which is a common occurrence.
The most robust, cost-effective, and long-term solution is to bypass the native app’s front-end tracking entirely and implement a server-side solution using Google Tag Manager (GTM) Server-Side via Stape, pushing events from Shopify’s webhooks or event stream directly to the Google Ads API.
This provides resilient, deduplicated, and cookie-less tracking with Enhanced Conversions support.
The long answer is:
The integrated Shopify “Google & YouTube” channel app typically manages both the product feed to Google Merchant Center and the client-side Google Ads conversion tracking scripts simultaneously, often using the Google Ads Conversion API to securely pass conversion data, making your action of only disconnecting the feed a partial disruption.
The application’s design treats these two functions as a single unit, and by altering the Merchant Center link, you likely triggered a change that deactivated or removed the conversion tracking scripts it previously managed in your Shopify store’s customer events or checkout scripts.
Since you are now using Synprosis for your Merchant Center feed, the ideal architectural pivot is to establish an independent, server-side data pathway for your Google Ads conversion tracking to ensure complete data ownership and accuracy, which eliminates the dependency on the front-end browser and its inherent limitations like ad blockers or intelligent tracking prevention.
This involves configuring your Shopify store to send e-commerce event data via a webhook to a Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or Stape environment running a GTM Server-Side container, where a dedicated Google Ads tag can be triggered to send the Purchase event directly to Google via the Google Ads API.
Specifically, you would use the Conversions service within the Google Ads API to upload the conversion event, which must include a unique conversion_id, the conversion label, and a transaction ID parameter to ensure deduplication.
This server-side approach is cost-effective because Stape provides a managed, scalable cloud environment that is far less expensive than a fully custom GCP setup for most e-commerce traffic volumes and dramatically improves data quality, leading to better optimization and a higher return on ad spend in your Google Ads campaigns.
For maximum utility, you should also leverage this same server-side setup to push data to Google Analytics 4 using the Google Analytics Measurement Protocol, creating a single source of truth for all your conversion data and providing an excellent foundation for integrating reporting via the Looker Studio API or for large-scale data analysis with the BigQuery API.
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