Google Ads
In this guide, we will show you how to connect your Google Ads account to Census and create your first sync.
To set up a Google Ads sync, you'll need three things:
A Census Account – If you don't have one already, create a Free Trial Census Account
A Google Ads Account.
To create Customer Match syncs, your Google Ads Account will need access to the Customer Match feature. See Google's Customer Match policy for more details.
Access to your data warehouse. For details on how to create credentials, see our articles for Redshift, Snowflake, Google BigQuery, Databricks, and Postgres.
Once you are in Census, Navigate to Connections
Click the Add Service button
Select Google Ads in the dropdown list.
Follow Google OAuth flow to connect your Google Ads account.
Finally, select the Google Ads account you'd like to sync to
Please follow one of our short guides depending on your data warehouse technology
After setting up your warehouse, your Census Connections Page should look like this:
Navigate to the Models page.
Here you can write SQL queries or select dbt models that contain the data you want to send to Google Ads.
Right now, we're going to send data to an existing Customer Match list, which requires a specific set of properties. We'll create a model that has:
The email of the Customer
A list of the target Customer Match lists
Any other properties about the Customer that can assist in the match.
Once you have created your model, click save.
Now head to the Sync page and click the Add Sync button
In the " What data do you want to sync?" section
For the Connection, select the data warehouse you connected in step 2
For the Source, select the model you created in step 3
Next up is the "Where do you want to sync data to?" section
Pick Google Ads as the Connection
For Object, pick User Details
For the " How should changes to the source be synced?" section
Update or Create will be selected by default
Pick the right mapping key, in this case, we'll use Email
Finally, select the fields you want to update in the Mapper in the "Which Fields should be updated?" section. Here simply map the field from your model to the properties of the Customer Match List.
The end result should look something like this
Click the Next button to see the final preview which will have a recap of what will happen when you start the sync.
Now go back to your Google Ads account and view the list. If everything went well, you should see that the list has been updated with your data. Because this is an Audience Matching mechanism, Google will not tell you the exact number of matches it found, but should tell you that it was updated.
That's it! In 5 steps, you connected your data warehouse to Google Ads and built live Customer Match audiences Google Ads 🎉
Service | Object Name | Supported? | Identifiers |
Customer Match | Customer | ✅ | User ID, Mobile ID, Email, Phone Number |
Offline Conversions | Click, Call | ✅ | Click ID, Caller ID |
Contact us if you're looking for support more additional Google Ads objects.
Google Customer Match behavior
Google Customer Match, as its name implies, is a matching service rather than the usual direct upload. In order to protect user data, we do not upload the data you provide directly. Instead, records are "matched" against Google's existing user base. To do this, both sides perform a "hash" -- or consistent, but irreversible conversion -- of data so users can be compared without revealing the actual personally identifiable information. Census automatically takes care of this hashing step for you.
We recommend you do not use Google's Customer Match expiration setting. Census-synced records are subject to the same expiration and will not be re-uploaded unless they are changed in your source data.
Behaviors | Supported? | Objects? |
Update or Create | ✅ | All |
Mirror | ✅ | All |
Contact us if you're looking for additional Sync Behaviors!
Note: If you're reusing an existing Customer Match Lists, Census will not remove any users already added to those lists through other means.
Learn more about our sync behaviors on our Core Concept page.
Contact us via [email protected] or start a conversion via the in-app chat.
