Question from Reddit user:
I’m dealing with a really unique situation. I work for a large company with different divisions. One division has an agency using DoubleClick and another division uses regular Google Ads. The two can’t be combined or consolidated.
The site is currently tagged for the DoubleClick agency but we are working to get Google ads conversion pixels installed. The only thing I can think of is to have both tag systems installed on the pages. Is there any room for conflicts between the two? Are the two types of tags fundamentally different in the types of information they pass to Google?
Thanks!
Answer from Nabil:
The short answer is:
You can safely install both the DoubleClick (now Google Marketing Platform) conversion tags and the Google Ads conversion pixels on the same pages without conflict, as they use different parameters and cookies, and are designed to coexist.
However, having two separate conversion tracking systems creates a maintenance and data redundancy headache.
A superior solution is to consolidate both tracking systems into a single, unified point of collection using Google Tag Manager and then forwarding the conversion data to both platforms via the Google Ads API and the Google Marketing Platform API from a server-side tagging environment like Stape or Google Cloud Platform.
The long answer is:
Your situation, where two distinct divisions require separate conversion tracking for programmatic (DoubleClick) and search (Google Ads) platforms, is common in large enterprises and can be managed by installing both sets of client-side tags.
The tags are fundamentally different in their purpose and the unique identifiers they rely on: the Google Ads tag uses the Google Click ID (gclid) for attribution to its specific platform, while the DoubleClick/Google Marketing Platform Floodlight tags use unique Floodlight configuration IDs and often rely on cross-site tracking cookies for their broader, multi-channel programmatic attribution.
They won’t conflict, but managing two separate client-side scripts is fragile due to issues like page load speed, ad blockers, and cookie consent banners.
The elegant solution to this maintenance issue and to ensure data consistency across both platforms is to shift your conversion measurement to a server-side architecture.
You would use Google Tag Manager on the client side to only collect the raw user interaction data, such as a successful form submission or purchase event, along with the relevant identifiers like the gclid and any DoubleClick ID that is available.
GTM then sends this single, unified data payload to your server-side container hosted on a platform like Stape or Google Cloud Platform.
Within the server container, you then use the Google Ads API to send the conversion event directly to the Google Ads platform, and you use the Google Marketing Platform API (specifically the Floodlight API) to send the same conversion event directly to the programmatic platform.
This means you only have one set of conversion logic to maintain on your website, but you satisfy the independent tracking requirements of both divisions by using a resilient, server-to-server data transmission method.
This dramatically improves data accuracy by being less susceptible to browser limitations and offers a future-proof, consolidated approach to conversion management across different Google advertising stacks.
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