How I can track user behavior from Google Ads?

[Jamantai]

Hi Experts,

We are going to use Google Ads as a data source for one of our customers. Because it is a beta version, the Google Ads source connector cannot be used, and I can only see dummy data after connecting. Meanwhile, I can only export reporting data from the Google Ads UI, not user behavior data. Can anyone tell me how I can track user behavior from Google Ads? I’m not sure if a url parameter (for example, utm) can be added to the Ad’s URL to track user behavior. Can anyone help me with this? Thank you kindly.

Regards,
Jaman

[Anil_Umachigi · Accepted solution]

@Jamantai Right so what you are to do is two different things. 

1. Use the Google Ads connector: This ( as you mentioned) sources mainly the campaign performance report and may not include user behavior ( generally or at campaign level). The purpose of this would be to get this data into Adobe CJA  (or any other BI Reporting tool) for creating reports and dashboard
2. User Behavior and Campaign analysis: To do this you will have to add tracking parameters ( utm in google terms) to the campaigns and track them using "web sdk" implemented on site and pass this data for reporting. You can either send this to Adobe analytics or CJA directly based on how analytics is set up within your org. 

Hope that helps, let me know if you have any questions. 

[Anil_Umachigi · Accepted solution]

@Jamantai Right so what you are to do is two different things. 

1. Use the Google Ads connector: This ( as you mentioned) sources mainly the campaign performance report and may not include user behavior ( generally or at campaign level). The purpose of this would be to get this data into Adobe CJA  (or any other BI Reporting tool) for creating reports and dashboard
2. User Behavior and Campaign analysis: To do this you will have to add tracking parameters ( utm in google terms) to the campaigns and track them using "web sdk" implemented on site and pass this data for reporting. You can either send this to Adobe analytics or CJA directly based on how analytics is set up within your org. 

Hope that helps, let me know if you have any questions. 

[Jamantai]

Thank you very much @Anil_Umachigi. Do you think custom parameters can be added to Google Ads URLs so that when the customer lands on the website from the ads, we can know what keyword was searched and which campaign was clicked by this customer?

[Anil_Umachigi · Accepted solution]

@Jamantai  You can read here on how to tag your google ads with tracking parameters, this example shows UTM params, you can additionally add the parameters used for adobe anlaytics ( example ?cid=cmpName:cmpDate ) 

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033863#zippy=%2Cin-this-article

Also i doubt you can capture the keyword, better check with Google Ads support on the same. 

Hope that helps 

Anil

[RyanMoravick]

@Anil_Umachigi regarding your second point, you wouldn't be able to see user-level data, correct? Only aggregate level campaign data? Google Ads does not provide any sort of user-level reporting nor does it allow for the extraction of user-level data out of their platform. Can you confirm?

[Anil_Umachigi]

@RyanMoravick Yes that's is correct, none of the marketing vendors ( google, meta) share that info, all one get's is campaign related information. 

Also as you mentioned it does not allow user level data into any other external platform ( CDP etc.) 

However ( not related to CDP)  if you really keen on accessing that data, there is an option i.e Google's Ads Data Hub, this however is all within google bigquery (data does not leave google servers)  where you upload identifers and match against what google knows about the customer! 

More info here, Happy exploring  

https://developers.google.com/ads-data-hub