About Floodlight

Campaign Manager 360 now supports the global site tag for Floodlight measurement. We’re recommending that customers update their Floodlight tag implementation to use the global site tag in order to benefit from the latest features and integrations.

Floodlight is an optional feature in Campaign Manager 360. It allows you to track and report on conversions — the actions of users who visit your site after viewing or clicking on one of your ads — and to set up an audience, which compiles lists of users who've performed specific actions on a site, then makes those users available for targeting by subsequent campaigns.

Implementing Floodlight conversion tracking tags

Floodlight activities correspond to specific events you’d like to track, such as conversions on your website or adding users to audience lists. For each event you want to track, you’ll create a new Floodlight activity. Campaign Manager 360 creates the tags that you’ll add to your site to track each event. Learn more

On their own, Floodlight tags have a minimal effect on the layout of webpages and the speed with which they're displayed. Additionally, a webpage containing a Floodlight tag loads correctly even if the user's browser is unable to download the Floodlight content.

The typical response time for Floodlight calls is around 150-300 milliseconds, but we cannot guarantee these times. Additionally, any third-party pixels inserted into the Floodlight tag that call additional domains may also affect the load time.

How advertisers use Floodlight conversion tracking

With conversion tracking, advertisers use Floodlight to determine the effectiveness of their online campaigns in terms of both sales and user activity on their sites. You can determine the monetary value of purchases that were a direct result of your campaign, or discover how many users purchased a product or completed an online form. The information recorded by the Floodlight tag depends on its configuration and its location on the advertiser's site.

Using dynamic tags, advertisers can also include their own tracking tags, tracking tags from a publisher, or any other code that they want to serve in conjunction with the Floodlight conversion-tracking tag.

Example case

The following example illustrates one possible use of Floodlight, following the process from the user's first viewing of the ad through the generation of a Floodlight report.

1. A web user views a Campaign Manager 360 ad offering a free app.

   The Campaign Manager 360 ad server reads the user's cookies or device ID. Learn more

2. Later that same day, the user visits the advertiser's website, which contains a registration form that the user has to fill out before accessing the free app.

   To count how many users view the form, the advertiser has put a Floodlight tag on the webpage. The tag makes a call to Campaign Manager 360 to detect and count the page view. As part of this process, Campaign Manager 360 checks the user's DoubleClick cookie to see whether the user has previously viewed or clicked on the advertiser's ad. In this case, the page view is counted as a view-through conversion.

3. The user submits the form and is taken to a webpage that confirms the user's email address. This second webpage contains a different Floodlight tag, which enables Campaign Manager 360 to record a second view-through conversion.

4. In Campaign Manager 360, the advertiser generates reports on the Floodlight activities. You can see reports on each Floodlight activity separately or view the information in aggregate.

5. In Campaign Manager 360, the advertiser uses Floodlight data to create audience lists, which are then available for targeting. Learn more about remarketing

Due to differences in cookies and device ID settings, there may be times when conversions can't be measured directly. In some cases, Campaign Manager 360 uses machine learning and historical data to model conversions.