Campaigns — Google Ads
How to read your Google Ads spend, performance, and attribution in Ordinary once the Google Ads integration is connected.
Written by The Ordinary Team · Updated Campaigns — Google Ads
Google Ads campaign reporting requires Starter or higher and a connected Google Ads account. See Connecting Google Ads.
Once Google Ads is connected, Ordinary pulls your campaign, ad-group, ad, and keyword data and cross-references it with pixel-observed attribution. Left nav → Campaigns → Google.
The list view
One row per campaign. Columns:
- Campaign name
- Status (Enabled / Paused / Removed — read directly from Google)
- Channel type (Search, Display, YouTube, Shopping, Discovery, Performance Max)
- Spend — cumulative in the date range, in your display currency
- Impressions, Clicks, CTR
- Purchases — Google-reported purchase conversions in the date range. Ordinary counts purchase conversion actions only — page-view, add-to-cart, and other micro-conversion goals that some Google Ads accounts count in their Conversions column (for example, goals auto-created by Shopify’s Google & YouTube channel app) are excluded, so this can read lower than the Conversions column in Google Ads itself. The full per-goal split is on the campaign detail page’s Conversion actions tab.
- Orders attributed — orders at your storefront that had this campaign in the UTM chain or a Google click identifier match
- Revenue attributed — sum of those orders’ revenue
- ROAS — Revenue attributed / Spend
- CPA — Spend / Orders attributed
Click any row to drill down.
The detail view
The campaign-detail page has tabs for:
- Ad groups — same columns as the campaign row, one per ad group, with click-through to the ad-level view.
- Ads + Keywords — drill into a specific ad group to see ads and keywords with the same metric set.
- Asset Library — headlines, descriptions, image and video creatives associated with the campaign and its ad groups.
- Placement Breakdown — performance split by device (mobile / desktop / tablet) and network placement (Search, Display, YouTube, Shopping, Discovery, Performance Max).
- Demographic Breakdown — age range, gender, parental status, household income range. Google redacts demographic data when the underlying sample size is too small; redacted rows collapse into an “Unknown” bucket.
- Geographic Breakdown — performance by the physical location of the people who saw and clicked your ads. The “Top regions” card breaks your spend, conversions, and ROAS out by country and region/state (e.g. which U.S. states your customers are in), surfacing your highest-spend regions.
- Cohort & LTV — new vs. returning customers acquired by this campaign, projected lifetime value, and time-to-conversion histograms. First-party join between Google-attributed orders and your store-side customer history.
- Conversion Gap — compares Google-reported conversions to the orders your store actually recorded for this campaign. Surfaces attribution gaps so you can see where Google over- or under-counts vs. your authoritative store data.
- Configuration History — daily snapshots of each campaign’s budget, status, bidding strategy, and target CPA/ROAS, so you can line up a performance shift against the day a setting actually changed. Only days where something moved are shown.
A time-series chart at the top of every tab shows spend vs. revenue (or your selected metric pair) across the date range.
Attribution model
The model selector at the top of the page affects the “Orders attributed” and “Revenue attributed” columns. Same four models as the main attribution report — last-click (default), first-click, linear, time-decay.
See Attribution models explained.
Why Google’s numbers don’t match
Like Meta, the Google tab has a Click-through / View-through toggle in the page header. Across your whole account Google will usually report more conversions than Ordinary’s Click-through view — that’s expected, the two count different things, and the gap is a question to test, not a number that’s simply “wrong.” Reasons they differ:
- Google reports cross-device and view-through conversions via
its identity graph. Ordinary uses click-based attribution against
the storefront pixel and the Google click identifier (
gclid) on the order’s URL. - Attribution window — Google’s is configured per conversion action, often 30 days post-click. Ordinary credits the actual last ad click in the customer’s journey under your chosen model, looking back up to 180 days — a different window and method, so the counts won’t line up one-to-one.
- Google adjusts conversion counts retroactively for several weeks as late-arriving conversions arrive. Ordinary’s daily refresh picks these up; if you’re looking at “yesterday’s numbers” the day-of, Google’s count is preliminary.
- Smart Bidding modeled conversions — Google fills in gaps with modeled conversions (where ITP / consent / cookieless shoppers can’t be deterministically tracked). Ordinary doesn’t model — it reports the deterministic count from your storefront pixel.
- Ordinary counts purchases only — if your Google Ads account includes non-purchase goals (page views, add-to-cart, begin checkout) in its Conversions column, Google’s own UI will show a much higher number than Ordinary. The campaign detail page’s Conversion actions tab shows every goal Google reported so you can see exactly what your account is counting. If you see page-view or add-to-cart goals listed as primary conversions there, consider setting them to Secondary in Google Ads — primary conversion actions are also what Google’s Smart Bidding optimizes toward.
- A single campaign can occasionally flip — show more click-verified orders in Ordinary than Google reports for it. That’s last-click crediting the campaign that got the final click, while Google spreads credit differently. It evens out at the account level — compare totals there, and treat the per-campaign gap as directional.
If you need to reconcile specific numbers, use Google Ads for delivery metrics (impressions, CTR, CPC) and Ordinary for outcome metrics (orders, revenue, ROAS).
What if ad spend looks zero
- Connection expired — check Settings → Integrations → Google Ads. If it says “Needs reauth,” click Reconnect.
- Date range past your plan’s lookback — partial data badge will show.
- Initial sync hasn’t run yet — first sync typically takes 5–15 minutes after connecting.
- No spend on Google Ads for the date range — confirm in Google Ads UI directly.