My customer uses Google Ads that point to DOMAIN A, and the customer converts to DOMAIN B. We want to report the purchase event as part of source CPC but instead GA4 sees the traffic from Google Ads as a referral.
The Stape instructions only says to have one conversion linker on the server-side but that does not contain the option to add the cross-domains as I’m used to in the web conversion linker. Any ideas?
This is the situation:
Google Ads point to DOMAIN A
Conversion happens on DOMAIN B
This is the goal
Report the conversion on DOMAIN B as CPC coming from DOMAIN A.
This is the setup:
Google Ads Enhanced API setup with GA4 client
Conversion linker only active in the server (I assume you don’t need another conversion linker on web)
Hi Michel,
If I got your problem correctly, you may simply store UTMs and click ID once the user is landed on domain A and on redirect to domain B decorate the URL with the stored query parameters. Thus GA4 will attribute the conversion according to UTMs and Google Ads will get their click ID.
Hey @Michel_Brok like you said yourself - server-side Conversion Linker does not currently support that functionality, so you have an array of options:
Just apend gclid to the URL when swithing domains, so that Conversion Linker on the destination picks it up and sets a cookie
thanks @Dan , if you “switch to web ads”, do you mean fire the event from the web container for Google Ads? How does that then communicate with the server container?
Hi @Dan, Thanks for you insight. In this case I use conversion linked on both side (web GTM & server GTM).
There is another scenario.
Client has 3rd party payment gateway. User click google ads → lands on the page → add to cart → and then to make payment, they goes to 3rd party payment domain. In this case, I can’t append UTMs and gclid with payment gateway url, So could you please guide me what should I do to track it properly so that I don’t loose conversion attribution.
This is only possible if the user then returns from the third-party payment provider back to your site (e.g. to the thank you page). Otherwise, you will not be able to track conversions actually made on the third-party site in any way.
Yes, user lands on the thank you page. My question is when user redirect from the 3rd party domain, will the conversion loose the source (Google ads)? Will it attribute conversion properly or treat it as direct traffic since it’s coming from 3rd party?
In GA4 you just need to specify in ignore referrer these third party platforms and everything should work - this redirect will not be counted as a session source.
Also in the GA4 settings I suggest increasing the default session length, as a user can often spend more than the standard 30 minutes on a third-party platform. I usually recommend increasing the default session length to 4-5 hours.
