Last Updated September 6, 2022
Floodlight tags are tracking tags created within Google Search Ads 360 and Campaign Manager. They are used to track and to give credit to conversions and sales, by being placed on a website’s pages.
Floodlight tags store conversion data in a Floodlight activity. They are more useful than say the standard Google Ads tag because of the additional features that come alongside it, such as being able to upload offline conversions and associate these with a floodlight activity, and the ability to use formula columns to up-weight or down-weight revenue/conversions under certain conditions.
There are two types of Floodlight tag – Counter or Sales
- Counter counts the number of actions completed on your site, e.g. pages viewed
- Sales determines the number of sales and their transaction value
How can Floodlight tags be used?
For example if you run an omni-channel business whereby a conversion can happen offline, e.g. a customer could see your paid search ad and then complete a purchase in store rather than online, then you would want to recognise the value of that paid search ad in the path to conversion.
Or you may run a lead generating business whereby the sale is only finalised offline by a sales rep.
That’s where offline conversions come in. For this to work you need to be able to associate a GCLID with the sale. This feature is also available within Google Ads as well as Search Ads 360.
Floodlight tags can also be used with formula columns to create custom bid strategies within Search Ads 360. For example you could upweight transaction revenue from new customers, or combine separate Floodlight conversion actions with custom weightings applied to different steps of the conversion path.
What are formula columns?
Formula columns allow you to apply an excel-like formula to your floodlight activities, in order to amend your conversion values, which can then be used in a Search Ads 360 custom bid strategy.
You could use a formula column to create your own custom metric – e.g. Transactions from Existing Customers or Add to Baskets from users who have visited certain pages
You can even use them to rename columns to make them specific to internal naming conventions your business uses.
Formula columns can also be used to alert you to changes in activity within your campaigns. This is especially useful for flagging any changes in your account that might impact performance, which can simplify your reporting. This can then be combined with custom rules and alerts to send you an email when activity changes.
For example
- Cost – change by +/- 20% over the last 7 days
- Conversion Rate – change by +/- 20% over the last 7 days
However where Floodlight tags can become really useful is with u-variables, also known as custom variables.
What are custom floodlight variables?
Custom variables or u-variables, are variables tracked from the data layer when a Floodlight sales or counter tag fires. For example a tag might fire when a user adds an item to their basket, and there could be custom variables set up in the data layer for whether the user is signed in to their account, or which store a customer has previously purchased from.
This specific u-variable can then be used within a conversion action or to create an audience, in order to create a bid strategy for them.
For example if location is important to your business (e.g an airline), you could create a specific audience of users who have visited a certain page on your site and are interested in journeys to / from a specific destination. This could be used to add another layer of specificity alongside location targeting.
Another example might be capturing information on whether a customer is a B2B or B2C customer (if your business has both types), which would allow you to create highly targeted audiences for both.
Note that u-variables cannot contain personally identifiable information as per Google’s policies.
How to add a Floodlight tag to SA360
Floodlight tags are first created within Google Campaign Manager, which then syncs with Search Ads 360. You’ll need to specify the type of Floodlight tag to create – either Sales or Counter.
You can then also specify any custom variables you would like to capture from your datalayer when the tag fires in
Implementation is simpler if you use Google Tag Manager as you can link your container to Campaign Manager for easy implementation of your Floodlight tags via GTM.
That’s just some of the ways you can incorporate Floodlight tags into your measurement strategy. Floodlight tags are an incredibly useful feature of Campaign Manager and Search Ads 360 which allow increased flexibility and customisability over the standard Google Ads or Google Analytics tag.
