Why you should track Google Discovery Ads with the Google Ads tag (and one other top tip) 

• Many advertisers are reporting great results with Google Discovery Ads, with a vast number of placements across Youtube Home, Watch Next, Discover, and Gmail. These are intended to be Instagram style ads - think rich, visual, and aspirational content 

• If you’re planning on running Google Discovery ads, then you should first stop and consider your tracking tag setup 

• You may be tempted to maintain the same Google Ads tracking setup when running Discovery ads. For many people this is the Google Analytics tag, given its easily integration with Google Analytics, the most popular web analytics platform

Take Advantage of the Google Ads tag Instead

• The Google Ads tag, like its name, sends conversion data directly to Google Ads. It also gives you access to View through conversions (unlike the Google Analytics tag), increasing the data you get back from the tag. View-through conversions (“View-through conv.”) are conversions that are recorded when users view (but don’t interact with) an ad and then convert later. (sic) This is particularly useful for display ads as users may not click, but be influenced by the ad and then later convert. 

• As Display activity is upper-funnel, you’re likely to see a significant portion of exposed users converting through view-through conversions, compared with clicking through. You can find these conversions under the column “View-through conversions”, 

• The Google Ads tag can then be applied as a conversion action set at the campaign level, therefore not interfering with tracking in your other campaigns. Micro-conversions can then be segmented under Segment < Conversions < Conversion Actions

• The other piece the Google Analytics tag doesn’t so easily give you is micro-conversions. Micro-conversions are secondary conversions which represent a significant step in driving users towards your end goal (i.e lead form submissions or sales), but don’t have any true value other than what you may ascribe to them. 

Current Limitations of Data-driven Attribution for Discovery Ads

• The default attribution setup in Google Ads is moving to data-driven attribution, and whilst this is great for smaller advertisers stuck on last click and not taking advantage of data-driven, there is still a significant limitation for upper-funnel media. 

• Whilst Google offers data-driven attribution for Search, Shopping, Youtube and Display, they don’t yet offer cross-channel data driven attribution support for Discovery Ads. This means that if a user journey path looks like this Discovery < Search < Shopping - then Discovery won’t receive any of the conversion credit. As it currently stands in this case, last click attribution still stands. 

An Alternative Solution (though with its own limitations) 

• An alternate solution would be to run Discovery ads within their own Google Ads account (with no other activity) with a Google Ads tag, and attribute 100% of the conversion credit to Display (post-click and post view)

• Again here you would be operating on a last google ads click basis. Whilst this would give you a clear picture as to when Discovery featured within the conversion path, you would still be lacking a holistic cross-channel view of Discovery’s influence within the conversion path compared with other channels. 

Bonus Tip - Focus on Micro-Conversions

• Discovery ads perform best when given micro-conversions to optimise towards, which gives the automated bid strategy more data to optimise towards

• Micro conversions can also help the bid strategy more quickly learn what an engaged user is like, therefore speeding up the time it takes to generate positive results for you or your clients 

• This applies to other automated bid strategies, not just Discovery ads. You may also wish to ascribe revenue values to your micro-conversions, so that the primary conversion is valued more highly than the secondary. 

• Micro-conversions you could test

  • Add to basket - ecommerce

  • Proceed to checkout- ecommerce

  • Email signup - lead gen/ecommerce

  • Time on site - lead gen

References

1. Top 20 web analytics tools from our survey of 2000+ experts - https://www.hotjar.com/web-analytics/tools/ 

2. Discovery ads - https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/9176876?hl=en-GB 

3. Google Analytics tag - https://support.google.com/tagmanager/answer/6105160?hl=en

4. Google Analytics most popular platform - 

5. Google Ads tag - https://support.google.com/tagmanager/answer/6105160?hl=en