Event

Track purchases, signups and conversions from Google Ads and create Customer Match lists for targeting.

This integration utilizes Google’s Mobile Apps Conversion Tracking and Remarketing API.

There are three distinct ways of integrating with Google Ads from mParticle

• Native Apps (Android, iOS, tvOS) - using the mParticle SDKs
• Web - using the web-specific connection to forward data to Google Ads from your web event
• Using mParticle’s Events API - if you are not using mParticle’s SDKs to pass data to Google Ads

This topic will cover using and setting up all of these types of implementations separately.

Native Apps Integration

Regardless of whether you are using iOS, tvOS, or Android, you must first create Link IDs that allow mParticle to send data for your app to use the Google Ads integration.

Google Link ID

To use the Google Ads integration, you will need to create a Link ID for your Google Ads account.

Required Settings

Note that, apart from the Link ID, other settings are not required, and are only present in the Dashboard to support an older version of the integration used by a few legacy customers.

Creating a Link ID for Your App

To create a Link ID, do the following:

1. From the Google Ads dashboard, click Tools > Setup section > select Linked Accounts
2. Navigate to the Third-party app analytics tile, click Details, select Create Link ID
3. Navigate to App analytics provider > Other provider, and enter mParticle’s provider ID:

• 4353943319

4. Select your app’s platform and find your app in the Look up your app field.
5. Click the CREATE LINK ID button. The screen refreshes to show you the Third-party app analytics page with the LINK IDs you’ve just created.

Using the Link ID in the mParticle App

You will use this Link ID in the mParticle app when you create a output connection in the Connection Output dialog.

Data Mapping (Native Apps and Web)

Google’s current conversion tracking API supports a standard list of event types. mParticle events are automatically mapped to the appropriate Google Ads events as follows. The following table shows the data mapping for both native apps and Web.

Supported Events

Unsupported Events

Commerce Event Expansion

When forwarding Commerce Events, mParticle forwards the main event - ecommerce_purchase, add_to_cart, or view_item - including the event attributes and transaction ID, plus one custom event for each Product, including the event attributes, product attributes and the Transaction ID.

Attribute Mapping

Web Integration

The Google Ads integration requires the mParticle Google Ads Kit when connected to a web input. If you are initializing the web SDK using the Snippet Option then the Kit is automatically included for you. If you are Self Hosting the SDK then you need to add this kit manually into your source code.

The following settings are used for Web-specific configurations. These are the parameters you would set when setting up a Web-specific connection if you are forwarding data collected by mParticle to Google Ads.

Creating a Conversion ID and Label

You need to create a Conversion ID before you can use the Web integration for Google Ads. The instructions for creating a Conversion ID can be found at the following Google support page:

• Set up your conversion for your website

1. It is recommended to click the New tab and follow the instructions on that page to generate a new Conversion ID.
2. Once you have followed the steps to create a Conversion ID, you must select the Conversion IDs for the Event snippet. You will see a similar dialogue box as below.

3. In the gtag function invocation, the last argument is an object with a key of send_to and a value in the format of “AW-CONVERSIONID/LABEL”. In the above example, the Conversion ID is 753728982 and the label is nl4-CKuq25wBENb7s-cC Enter your Conversion ID in the Event Configuration Settings when you add an event output:

4. Enter your label in the Connection Settings once you connect Google Ads to Javascript as an output:

5. In the mParticle app, set up the configuration (explained in the Configuration Settings section), and then configure the connection (explained in the Connection Settings section).

Using mParticle’s Events API

If you are using mParticle’s Android, iOS, or tvOS SDK, the user agent string is automatically collected for you. If you are not using these SDKs, this section explains how to construct the user agent string.

Constructing a Correctly Formed User-Agent Header

The Google Ads integration utilizes Google’s Mobile Apps Conversion Tracking and Remarketing API. This requires a correctly formatted User-Agent header, retrieved from information about the device.

If you are forwarding data collected by mParticle’s native SDKs, the required information is collected automatically. Note that the one required field is the Advertising ID in the user agent header.

If other values are not present in a batch received using the Events API, mParticle will still attempt to construct a User Agent Header, based on default values. However, mParticle cannot guarantee that this header will be accepted by Google Ads. Therefore, it is important to provide accurate values.

As explained previously, if you are not using mParticle’s Android, iOS, or tvOS SDKs (or are using the mParticle Events API), you will need to ensure the following fields are provided.

Obtaining Your Build Identifier

One of the required fields to be included in the user agent string is the build identifier. In order to retrieve the build identifier, you can use one of the following code snippets to retrieve it.

To obtain the device_info.build_identifier value:

String buildId = Build.ID;

@import Darwin.sys.sysctl;

NSString *buildId(void) {
  size_t bufferSize = 64;
  NSMutableData *buffer =
    [[NSMutableData alloc]
      initWithLength:bufferSize];
  int status =
    sysctlbyname("kern.osversion",
      buffer.mutableBytes,
      &bufferSize, NULL, 0);
  if (status != 0) {
    return nil;
  }
  return [[NSString alloc]
    initWithCString:buffer.mutableBytes
    encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];
}

Enhanced Conversions

When using the Google Ads web integration, you have the option of leveraging Google’s Enhanced Conversions. This allows you to send first-party customer data to Google in a secure way. Read more about Google’s Enhanced Conversions and how to set it up on Google’s side here.

Prerequisites

• mParticle prequisites:

  • Your web workspace needs to be configured for event batching in order to leverage Enhanced Conversions. If it is not configured for event batching, please contact your customer success manager. To determine if you are on web batching, follow the instructions here.
  • Check both Enable Google Site Tag and Enable Enhanced Conversions in connection settings.

Creating a Conversion ID and Label

As with non-enhanced conversions, you will need to create a Conversion ID. Follow those directions from above.

Additionally, there are a few extra steps to set up enhanced conversions in Google’s set up page:

1. Under Enhanced conversions, select Turn on enhanced conversions.
2. Under Implementation Method, select Global site tag or Google Tag Manager and press NEXT.
3. You will be prompted for your URL. Enter that into the text field and click CHECK URL.

4. If mParticle loads Google Tag Manager dynamically for you, Google tells you that the tracking tag was not detected. Click on select one manually. If you don’t see this message, go to the next step.
5. Click the Global site tag radio button and press NEXT.

6. Select Edit code from the drop down for how you want to set up enhanced conversions.

After completing the set up from Google’s side, you are ready to send Enhanced Conversions via mParticle to Google. Following the Test Search example below, simply pass unhashed first-party data, to the custom flag "GoogleAds.ECData" as a Custom Flag containing a stringified JSON Object.

The format of your first party data should follow Google’s support docs here under Identify and define your enhanced conversions variables. See below for a full example:

mParticle.logEvent(
  'Test Search',
  mParticle.EventType.Search,
  { attr1: 'value1' },
  { "GoogleAds.ECData": JSON.stringify({
    email: 'test@gmail.com',
    phone_number: '1-911-867-5309',
    first_name: 'John',
    last_name: 'Doe',
    home_address: {
        street: '123 Main St',
        city: 'San Francisco',
        region: 'CA',
        postal_code: '12345',
        country: 'US',
    }});
}); 

Per Google’s best practices, mParticle passes a unique ID for each event to Google in the form of a transaction_id in order to de-duplicate events. If you are logging a purchase event, you are required to provide a transaction ID. Otherwise, the mParticle Web SDK automatically assigns all non-purchase commerce events, page views, and custom events a transaction_id.

Consent

Google Ads has several notions of user-provided consent. Two of these apply to the S2S Google Ads events: ad_user_data and ad_personalization. These represent consent for ad user data and ad personalization.

For Web Customers using Google Ads Consent Mode, Google provides two additional fields: ad_storage and analytics_storage.

Additionally, based on the configured connection setting, server-to-server calls for iOS, Android and tvOS will indicate whether European regulations apply.

User-specified Consent

To configure user consent forwarding under this value, a mapping should be set-up leveraging mParticle’s notion of Consent Purposes. To learn more about handling user consent within mParticle’s platform, see the following docs: Data Privacy Controls.

Once a Consent Purpose is set up, user consent information can be associated with it in subsequent Event Batches. The Consent Purpose data mapping can then be configured for downstream forwarding via the User Consent Data Mapping connection setting.

Consent Defaults

In the absence of a user-defined consent value for the ad_user_data, ad_personalization, ad_storage, and analytics_storage fields via the Consent Purpose mapping, a default value can be optionally configured via a separate drop-down setting for each consent type. When no user consent is provided, the default status is used, if specified. If omitted, the Unspecified status will be sent.

Caution: It is recommended that in the long term, you set up user-specified consent through the Consent Purpose mapping, such that the user consent is correctly forwarded to Google. It is your responsibility as a Data Controller to stay compliant under the GDPR, and set up user consent collection for downstream forwarding. The consent default setting can be deprecated in the future.

Consent Behavior (Web)

mParticle follows Google’s recommendations when forwarding consent state defaults and consent state updates. However, the Web kit behaves differently depending on how your default consent states are configured:

• If your consent state default is set to Denied or Granted:

  • Whenever a user changes their consent state away from the default, the Web kit forwards the new value downstream the next time a custom event or page view event is triggered.
  • Whenever a page is refreshed or the kit is re-initialized, the default consent states are automatically forwarded downstream, along with any consent state changes the user may have made.

• If your consent state default is set to Unspecified:

  • As soon as a user accepts or denies the consent purposes specified in your connection settings, the mapped consent states are set as the defaults after a page is refreshed or the kit is re-initialized. These new consent state defaults are then forwarded downstream.

mParticle App Configuration/Connection Settings (Native Apps/Web)

Regardless of whether you’re configuring/sending data from a Native Apps/Web platform, the following parameters must be set in the mParticle app. The tables below will guide you through what the parameters are and the platform to which they apply.

Configuration Settings

You will need to set the following parameters in the Setup > Outputs > Google Ads > Configuration settings dialog.

Connection Settings

When you are ready to use the Google Ads output from the data sent to mParticle, you must enter the following information in the Connections > [Web/iOS/Android/tvOS] > Connected Outputs > Google Ads dialog.