Google Ads

Using Google Ads, you can market your brand to potential customers around the corner or across the globe. The Google Ads/Grow integration gives you a platform to monitor all of your Google Ads data and make effective marketing decisions.

Connecting to Google Ads

Before starting, please collect your Google Adwords username (email address) and password.

1. Log in to your Grow account and click Add Metric. Select Google Ads from your list of data sources, then click the blue Connect button.
2. It will ask you to sign in with your Google account.
3. Once you have signed in with your account, you will need to grant Grow permission to access your Google Ads account.
4. Go ahead and press the blue Allow button.

And that's it! You are good to go.

Building a Metric

To help get you started in using Google Ads, here's a quick tutorial for building a metric that measures the cost per click in the last 7 days.

Endpoints

Google Ads offers two main report types in Grow: Adwords Reports and Custom AWQL. If you want to use AWQL to query your data, choose the second option. You can reference the help doc on AWQL from Google Ads for help writing it.

The report Adwords Reports returns a lot of reports. You can find a complete list of the available reports here. The most frequently-used reports are Account Performance, Campaign Performance, Ad Group Performance, and Ad Performance. A description of these is given below.

• Account Performance: returns statistics at the account level.
• Campaign Performance: returns statistics aggregated at the campaign level.
• Ad Group Performance: all statistics aggregated at the ad group level.
• Ad Performance: returns the data aggregated at the ad level.

When building a custom metric, there is a Columns selection that lets you segment the data that comes in for any of the reports. The columns available are different segments that are also available within Adwords. You will need to select the columns you want to have the data for before Grow will pull data.

If you want to see a description of the available segments for a specific report, first go to the list of reports, then select your report. In the table, click the title of the report in the left-hand column. This will bring up a list of all of the segments available. To see the description of a particular segment, click on it from one of the lists on this page.

Data Warehouse

Only Adwords Reports can be warehoused. You cannot write your own AWQL queries. You build your own custom tables; there are no default tables. The following are the available Adwords Reports:

• Account Performance Report
• Campaign Performance
• Ad Group Performance
• Ad Performance
• Keywords Performance
• Geo Performance
• Video Performance Report
• Budget Performance Report
• Shipping Performance Report
• Gender Performance Report
• Age Range Performance Report
• Search Query Performance Report
• Paid Organic Query Report

For each one of these reports, you are allowed to select different Attributes, Segments, and Metrics.

• Attributes: In the Google Ads API, these are properties or characteristics of objects within your advertising campaigns. These objects can be campaigns, ad groups, ads, keywords, etc. Attributes are used to specify and retrieve detailed information about the elements of your campaigns. When you query the API, you select which attributes of an object you want to retrieve.
  Examples:
  
  • An attribute of a campaign might be its name, status (e.g.: enabled, paused), or budget.
  • An attribute of an ad could include its headline text; description; or display URL.

• Segments: They are a way to split your data into subsets for more granular analysis. They don't change the actual data; instead; they break it down into smaller parts based on various criteria. Segmentation is used for analysis and reporting. It helps advertisers understand how different aspects of their campaigns perform across different contexts or audiences.
  Common segments include date (e.g.: daily, weekly), device type (e.g.: mobile, desktop), or geographic location. For instance, you can segment your data to see how your ads perform on mobile devices compared to desktops.
• Metrics: They are quantitative measurements used to assess the performance of your campaigns. They are the numerical data that result from your advertising efforts. Metrics are key to evaluating the success of your campaigns. They allow you to measure performance, identify trends, and make data-driven decisions to optimize your campaigns.
  Common metrics include Clicks, Impressions, Conversion Rate, Cost-per-Click (CPC), and Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). These metrics help you understand how effectively your ads are reaching and engaging your target audience. In practice, you will often use attributes, segments, and metrics in combination. For example: you might query the API to get the Click-through Rate (a metric) for each of your campaigns (an attribute) segmented by device type.

Together, these three components provide a comprehensive understanding of your advertising efforts. Attributes define the structure of your campaigns, segments break down this data for nuanced analysis, and metrics provide the performance results.

Not all attributes, segments, and metrics can be linked between each other. Grow will automatically grey out metrics that cannot be combined with your selected attributes and/or segments.

You can select the Date Grouping for your warehoused table. The available options are:

• Daily
• Monthly
• Quarterly
• Yearly
• 7 day Rolling (including today)
• 7 day Rolling (not including today)
• 30 day Rolling (including today)
• 30 day Rolling (not including today).

FAQs + Tips and Tricks

Divide Cost by 1 Million

Google Ads API data gives monetary amounts in micro cents. This means that for any money values, it will need to be divided by 1 million to get the value in dollars and cents. You can do this with a Calculated Columns Transform. Note that this only applies to Direct Query.

Can I See Which Ads Are on the Display or Search Networks?

If you add the Network column to your data, you can see the data separated by the Search Network, Display Network, or Cross-network values.

Segmenting your data

For pre-built metrics, it allows you to segment what data comes through by campaign, by Ad group, and then by keyword. You must select a campaign to select a group, and similarly select a group in order to choose a keyword to segment on. If you leave these fields blank, the pre-built metrics will return data for all of your campaigns and groups.

How do I use AWQL?

If you know AWQL, this can be a great option for combining data and fields from different reports. Google provides more information at this article here for writing AWQL. Script Ninja also offers an AWQL Tutorial and Generator here.

Error: Invalid field selected

Google Ads can be very particular, especially in selecting columns. Certain fields don't work with other fields, and oftentimes this is very specific.

For example, if you get this error in Grow: Error: Invalid field selected. Please review your query and try again., it probably means you are trying to use two fields or columns together that Google Ads doesn't support.

The best way to check this is to read the documentation Google provides here. To find a specific field, you can either use the finder in your browser, or there is a list of the fields on the right side of the page.

How do I include the current day using AWQL?

The AWQL syntax for DURING+LAST_30_DAYS+ does not include the current day.

To include the current day you can use the Date Interpolator and do DURING+{{date('-30days','YYYYMMDD')}},{{date('YYYYMMDD')}}+

Using the Geo_Performance_Report

The Geo_Performance_Report does give you the location data, but the Google Ads API doesn't include the location names, just a code. You can download a CSV from Google that that you can join to the Geo_Performance_Report to get the names.

1. Go to https://developers.google.com/adwords/api/docs/appendix/geotargeting and download the CSV shown at the top left (i.e., "LATEST .CSV (2019-08-14)").
2. Then add a new report in your Grow metric using Excel/CS Upload and upload the CSV file.
3. Add a Joined Report using the City field (or Region if you just want the state) from Google Ads and the Criteria ID from the CSV you uploaded. This will give you the city name, and country code for each location.
4. You can then remove the columns with the numerical codes that you don't need anymore (e.g., city, county/territory, Parent ID)

   

Can I get the Click Performance report into Grow?

Following Google Ads API update in April 2022 that deprecated their Adwords API, the Click Performance report is only able to pull back one day of data. Because of this as well as the lack of usage of that endpoint in Grow, the Grow team opted not to include this report. If this data would be of interest to you, please contact Grow Support to submit a feature request for our team to consider adding this in.

Can I get my Auction Insights into Grow?

Currently The Auction Insights report is not available via API. You could try reaching out to Google Adwords support to let them know that would be of interest to you.