Starter plan & up

Connecting Google Ads

How to connect your Google Ads account so spend, performance, and Google-attributed conversions show up in Ordinary reports.

Ordinary Written by The Ordinary Team · Updated

Connecting Google Ads

Connecting Google Ads requires Starter or higher. Free-tier stores see organic + pixel attribution but no paid-ad spend or performance.

Google Ads is how you pull Search, Display, YouTube, Shopping, Discovery, and Performance Max campaign spend + performance into Ordinary alongside your other paid channels.

Before you start

  • You’re on Starter or higher.
  • You have admin or standard access on the Google Ads account you want to connect (read-only access is not sufficient for the OAuth flow).
  • The Google account you’ll OAuth with is signed into the Google Ads account. (You may have multiple accounts; pick the one with access.)

Step 1 — start the OAuth flow

  1. Open Settings → Integrations → Google Ads.
  2. Click Connect Google Ads account.
  3. You’ll be redirected to Google to sign in and approve.

Ordinary requests access that is read-only for reporting, plus the ability to create draft ad creatives in your account when you ask it to. Anything Ordinary creates is a non-serving draft you review and publish yourself in Google Ads. Ordinary does not serve or modify live ads, edit campaigns, budgets, bids, or targeting, upload conversions, manage audiences, or change billing.

Step 2 — pick an account

After approving, you’ll land on a picker showing every Google Ads customer ID your Google user can see. Select the one that runs ads for your Shopify store.

If your account is under a Manager (MCC) account, the picker shows the child accounts directly — pick the one that owns the campaigns you want reported on.

Step 3 — wait for first sync

Ordinary immediately kicks off the first ingest:

  • Campaigns + ad groups + ads + keywords for the last 90 days
  • Performance breakdowns by device, network placement, geographic location, age, gender, parental status, and household income range
  • Asset content for your campaigns (headlines, descriptions, image and video creatives)
  • Configuration history (current state of campaign and ad-group budget, status, bid strategy, and targeting)

You can keep using the app — the sync runs in the background. The Settings → Integrations → Google Ads card shows a progress indicator. Initial sync typically takes 5–15 minutes depending on account size.

After it’s connected

  • Campaigns → Google — see spend, impressions, clicks, purchases, ROAS, and CPA at every level (campaign, ad group, ad, keyword). Conversion figures count purchase conversion actions only — micro-conversion goals (page views, add-to-cart) appear on the per-campaign Conversion actions tab instead of inflating the headline. See Campaigns — Google ads.
  • Cross-channel attribution — Google Ads spend feeds the unified channel-comparison view alongside Meta, Amazon Ads, and organic on the home dashboard.
  • Per-campaign breakdowns — open any campaign to see device, network placement, geographic, age, gender, parental status, and household income breakdowns alongside the cohort/LTV and conversion-gap analyses.
  • Storefront-attributed orders — orders that arrive at your storefront with a Google click identifier (gclid) are joined to your Google Ads campaigns so you can compare what Google reports against what your store actually recorded.
  • Create ad creatives — generate ad creatives in Ordinary and create them as drafts in your connected account, ready for you to review and publish in Google Ads.

Refresh cadence

  • Today’s data — refreshed frequently throughout the day.
  • Historical (yesterday and earlier) — refreshed daily for the 90-day rolling window. Google adjusts conversion attributions retroactively for several weeks, so the daily refresh keeps late-arriving conversions accurate.
  • On-demand refresh — click Refresh on Settings → Integrations → Google Ads to force-pull. Rate-limited to once every 15 minutes per store.

Switching to a different Google Ads account

Reconnect from Settings → Integrations → Google Ads and pick the new account in the picker. When the newly picked account differs from the one your existing data came from, Ordinary removes the previous account’s imported ad data and re-imports history from the new account — the two accounts’ numbers are never blended in reports. Reconnecting the same account (for example after a “Needs reauth” prompt) keeps all existing data.

Disconnecting

Settings → Integrations → Google Ads → Disconnect.

This stops future syncs and removes the stored connection. If Google Ads is your only connected Google integration, Ordinary’s sign-in access at Google is revoked too. If other Google integrations (Analytics, Search Console, Sheets) are still connected, they share one Google sign-in, so that sign-in stays active for them until the last one is disconnected — you can fully remove Ordinary’s access at any time from myaccount.google.com/connections. Previously imported ad data stays in the app, so your past reports remain visible.

To have the imported Google Ads data removed entirely, contact support. Connecting a different Google Ads account also removes it automatically (see “Switching to a different Google Ads account” above).

Troubleshooting

  • “Needs reauth” — token expired or was revoked from your Google account. Click Reconnect.
  • Account missing from picker — your Google user doesn’t have access to that customer ID, or the customer ID is under an MCC you can’t see. Ask the account owner to grant your Google user access in Google Ads.
  • Zero spend for yesterday — usually a sync timing issue. Google’s reporting endpoints sometimes finalize a few hours after UTC midnight. The next refresh will pick it up.
  • Numbers don’t match Google Ads UI — expected. See Campaigns — Google ads § Why Google’s numbers don’t match.

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