Google Ads
What It Does
Once your Google Ads account is connected, DURUM.ai automatically imports:
- Spend, clicks, and impressions, broken down by campaign, ad group, and ad, day by day
- Metadata for campaigns, ad groups, and ads (names, statuses)
Your Google Ads spend appears alongside your other sources in the dashboard and the Ads tab, for a unified view of acquisition cost and ROAS.
Frequency
- Every hour: recent spend is re-synced
- Every night: monthly aggregates are recalculated
Connecting
The connection uses your Google account. Only Google Ads access is requested; no other service in your Google account is involved.
Select your account
When connecting, you must select the Google Ads account to sync. Until an account is selected, the connection exists but no data comes in. If you reconnect later, select the account again.
Your account manager can also set up this connection for you.
Attribution
To tie your leads back to your Google campaigns, your final URLs must include UTM parameters. See the UTM Tracking page.
Campaigns launched by your account manager already include these parameters automatically, along with Google auto-tagging (gclid).
Server-Side Conversions (Data Manager API)
On top of the Google tag on your pages, DURUM.ai sends your conversions to Google Ads directly server to server, through Google's Data Manager API. This lets Google optimize your campaigns on real outcomes (qualified lead, booking, sale, new customer), even when the conversion happens offline, days after the click.
Every conversion sent carries as many matching signals as possible:
| Signal | Source |
|---|---|
| Google click ID (gclid, or gbraid / wbraid from iOS, YouTube and Demand Gen) | Captured when the prospect lands, tied to the conversion even weeks later |
| Email and phone | Your forms and your CRM, always sent hashed |
| First name, last name, postal code, country | CRM or billing, when the full set is available |
One checkbox in Google Ads
To accept conversions carrying an email or a phone number, your Google Ads account must have accepted the customer data terms (Goals > Conversion settings). Without it, Google rejects every upload. Your account manager will point you to the setting; allow about fifteen minutes for Google to apply the change.
Several Google Ads accounts
One client can send every conversion to several Google Ads accounts (for example a main account and a backup account), with the same Google authorization. Each conversion is sent separately to each account, with the same transaction ID, so it is never duplicated within an account. Set it up in Settings > Conversions > Google (add an account), then on each conversion, pick the account and that account's conversion action.
Customer Match Audiences
Why Google does not do this on its own
In Google Ads, a "conversion-based" audience only fills up when the conversion is recorded by the tag in the browser. A conversion imported server-side counts in your reports, but adds nobody to the audience. This is a Google rule, not a setting.
DURUM.ai works around this limit with Google's Customer Match audiences (customer lists). For every conversion sent, the contact is added, with the same hashed email and phone, to the lists you chose for that conversion. Your audiences then live on your real conversions: leads, qualified leads, bookings, buyers, each in its own account's list.
How it works
- In Google Ads, create your Customer list audiences (Tools > Audience manager), one per use, with the membership duration you want: 7 days, 30 days, 180 days, 365 days. Your account manager can create them for you.
- In DURUM.ai, on each Google conversion (Settings > Conversions), tick the lists to feed. One conversion can feed several lists, for example "Leads 7 d", "Leads 30 d" and "Leads 180 d".
- From then on, every conversion accepted by Google adds the contact to its lists, continuously, with nothing to do. Google itself removes the contact when the list's membership duration ends.
If you send your conversions to several accounts, each account has its own lists, fed by the conversions sent to that account.
Good to know
- Google takes 24 to 48 hours to display a list's size and match rate. A list showing "fewer than 500" on day one is not empty.
- The audience add happens after Google accepts the conversion, and its result is kept in the conversions log. An audience refusal never affects the conversion.
- The people added are those who filled out a form or bought from you, under the same consent terms as the conversion itself.
- To use these audiences in your campaigns, target (or exclude) the customer lists, not the older conversion-based audiences, which stay empty with server-side uploads.
Troubleshooting
If your Google Ads spend doesn't appear:
- Check that a Google Ads account is selected in the integration.
- Data only shows up once spend starts flowing: a freshly launched campaign can take a few hours to report its first numbers.
- Otherwise, contact your account manager.