Cross Domain Tracking Google Ads API

The problem:

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)
  • Both domains added to GA4
  • Auto-tagging is on
  • GA4 and Google Ads are linked

Server setup:

Web setup:

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.

Thanks @Vlad_Kononov , but is this not something Gads icm with GA cross domain tracking should do automatically?

Hey @Michel_Brok like you said yourself - server-side Conversion Linker does not currently support that functionality, so you have an array of options:

  1. Just apend gclid to the URL when swithing domains, so that Conversion Linker on the destination picks it up and sets a cookie

  2. Cookie re-store Server-side cross-domain tracking using Cookie reStore tag - Stape

  3. Switch to using web Conversion Linker (and web Ads tags)

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?

Yes, I mean that, and it would not communicate with server container.

should normal cross domain tracking without gclid work with the server-side Conversion Linker @Dan ?