How it works: Shopify to Google Ads
Client-side events
Event Name
Description
page_view
User has viewed any page
view_item
User has viewed an item on your website
view_item_list
User has seen a collection page on your website
Client-side events are tracked via Littledata's app embed directly to Google Ads.
Client-side events respect Shopify's consent mode, so if your store has a cookie banner, users can opt out of the tracking of these events.
All events are sent with your chosen Conversion Tag (e.g., AW-123). Conversion events include value and currency of the purchase, along with the Conversion Tag + Conversion Label (e.g. AW-123/label).
How to check that client-side events are being sent
Google Ads does not offer a real-time view of events to verify that your entire setup is functioning correctly. However, for client-side events, you can use Google Tag Assistant to check which events are being sent from your store to your Google destinations. By clicking 'Add Domain', you can verify how your data is being sent to Google.
Conversion actions
Littledata's Shopify to Google Ads connection automatically creates three conversion actions. They are automatically assigned a role, and their main purpose is to improve your targeting.
Conversion name
Role
Purchase - Littledata
Primary conversion, including all purchases
New Customer Purchase - Littledata
Secondary conversion, only first-time customer conversions
Returning Customer Purchase - Littledata
Secondary conversion, only returning customers' conversions
Using multiple primary conversion actions
If your Google Ads campaign is configured to track multiple primary conversion actions, Google will optimize towards all of them, treating each as a signal for bidding and budget allocation. This may dilute the effectiveness of your bidding strategy.
We recommend keeping our Purchase - Littledata conversion action as the only primary conversion action in your campaign. This ensures Google optimizes for the most accurate purchase data captured by our server-side tracking.
If you need to compare or validate Littledata's performance against other sources, you can set our conversion action as secondary temporarily, but keep in mind it won't be used for smart bidding in this case.
How to enable Enhanced Conversions
You will need to enable Enhanced Conversions for Leads and accept Customer data terms in your Google Ads account.
You can do this either in the Littledata installation process (where there is a step that will redirect you to the above-mentioned settings) or beforehand.
Accept Customer data terms
In your Google Ads account, go to Goals > Conversions > Settings, expand Customer data terms, and accept.
After you're done it should look like this:
The terms may have previously been accepted in Google Ads.
If you can't see Customer data terms, it is because the conversions are tracked by a manager account. The customer data terms need to be accepted by the manager's account and any Google Ads manager account that uploads on behalf of the manager account using cross-account tracking.
Accept Enhanced conversions for leads
In your Google Ads account, go to Goals > Conversions > Settings > expand Enhanced conversions for leads, turn on and save
For Littledata's implementation, it does not matter which method (Google tag / Google Tag Manager) you select before saving.
After you're done it should look like this:
Creating a conversion action in Google Ads
A conversion action is created automatically by Littledata during the setup process.
The name of the conversion action will be Purchase - Littledata so you can easily identify and measure the performance of our integration.
You can see your conversion action by going to Goals > Summary
The Inactive status means that the conversion action is not currently being tracked or used for optimization in your campaigns.
After the conversion action starts receiving data, the Inactive status should disappear while the conversion value and the number of conversions should increase.
Why Enhanced Conversions for leads instead of web?
Google's documentation states that
Enhanced Conversions for web are relevant for advertisers who want to track sales and events that happen on a website.
Enhanced Conversions for leads are relevant for advertisers who want to track sales that happen off a website (for example, phone or email) from website leads.
It may seem counterintuitive that Shopify stores would track leads.
However, where the Google cookie ID (gclid) is missing, Enhanced Conversions for web will reject events, so Enhanced Conversions for leads is the safer option to ensure even conversions without a known cookie will be processed.
Matching first-party user data
The server-side event payload contains SHA256 hashed (which is the industry standard for one-way hashing) customer data:
email address
first name
last name
address
And data that can be sent unhashed:
city
country
postal code
Google will try to match this first-party data with Google accounts.
Email and phone matching
Google keeps track of the email addresses and phone numbers for Google accounts and the corresponding hashed strings for those email addresses or phone numbers
If there's a match with the hashed strings we send, Google associates the account with the data.
Mailing address matching
Google joins hashed name and mailing address data for Google accounts to construct a matching key.
Google will try to construct a similar key based on the data we send, and if there's a match Google associates the account with the matching key.
Custom parameters
The following parameters are included with every conversion event sent to Google Ads.
market_handle
The handle of the Shopify Market for this event. Fixed as unassigned\_market for orders not attributed to a market.
market_id
The internal Shopify Market ID for this event. Fixed as 0 for orders not attributed to a market.
Market parameters in Littledata events
All conversion events sent to Google Ads include the Shopify Market handle by default. This allows you to analyse purchase performance by Shopify market, build market-specific Customer Match audiences for smart bidding and targeting, and understand which markets are driving the most valuable conversions. For example, you can segment conversion reports by market or adjust bidding strategies for different regions. This requires Shopify Markets to be active on your store, but does not require any per-market destination configuration within Littledata.
Last updated
Was this helpful?