About Floodlight activities

About Floodlight and Floodlight activities

Floodlight is an optional feature for conversion and event tracking in Display & Video 360. It allows you to monitor and report on conversions - the actions of users who visit your site after viewing or interacting with one of your ads - and to set up an audience, which compiles lists of users who’ve performed specific actions on a site, then make those users available for targeting in campaigns.

A Floodlight activity, previously called a pixel in Display & Video 360, is a snippet of HTML code that is used to track conversions, add users to remarketing lists, and pass information about sales transactions. For each event you want to track, you’ll create a new Floodlight activity. Display & Video 360 creates the tag code that you’ll add to your site or app for each event.

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 a dynamic Floodlight tag that call additional domains may also affect the load time.

Manage Floodlight basic details and Floodlight activities

You can manage your Floodlight basic details and Floodlight activities from your Display & Video 360 advertiser by navigating to Resources > Floodlight Group from the advertiser. From this page you can view:

• Floodlight basic details: Manage basic Floodlight settings such as tag types, lookback windows, and third-party integrations from this tab.
• Floodlight activities: Manage your individual Floodlight activities from this tab.
  • Click into a Floodlight activity to manage that activity’s basic details or view its code to place on the website or app where you want to track events.
  • Create new Floodlight activities from this tab. Learn more
  • Change the status of individual Floodlight activities.

Note that each Floodlight activity has a Floodlight activity ID and a legacy Display & Video 360 ID. The legacy ID refers to the old pixel ID for the Floodlight activity. Both are available in Reporting.

Change the status of Floodlight activities

The "Status" column indicates whether the activity is currently active, has been archived and disabled, or has been disabled due to a policy violation.

To change the status of a Floodlight activity:

1. From your advertiser, navigate to Resources > Floodlight Group > Floodlight Activities tab.
2. Select the activity that you want to the change the status for.
   Alternatively, you can change the status for each activity directly from the Floodlight Activities tab:

   • Under the  column, click on the circle to change the status of each activity.
     OR
   • Select multiple activities by checking the boxes on the left. Then click the Action button and choose a status.
3. Under the Name section click the dropdown on the right to change the status.
   • Active: Indicates the Floodlight activity is active and is serving
   • Disabled & archived: Indicates you have chosen to stop the Floodlight activity from serving. Both the Floodlight activity and its alerts will be hidden by default. Remember to remove the Floodlight tags from the advertiser's website.

     Selecting Disabled & archived prevents Floodlight from:

     • Counting conversions and including the data in reports that show aggregate conversions
     • Creating remarketing lists
   • Disabled - Policy Violation: Indicates the Floodlight activity is violating Google policy and therefore is disabled. Contact your account manager for more information.
4. Click Save.

Enable Floodlight activities for remarketing (third party ads servers)

When you don't use Campaign Manager 360 with Display & Video 360, Floodlight activities must be enabled for remarketing so that you can use the activity to create first-party audience lists.

To make a Floodlight activity available for remarketing:

1. From your advertiser, expand Resources in the left menu and click Floodlight Group.
2. Click on the Floodlight activities tab.
3. In the activity’s basic details, make sure the Remarketing checkbox is selected. 
4. Save your activity.

View audience lists created from Floodlight activities

To view the audience list Floodlight activities that are available to an advertiser for remarketing purposes, navigate to Audiences > All Audiences.

Audience list Floodlight activities can be used to target browsers that have loaded the activity at some point within the activity's window. In this context, an "audience list" is the collection of browsers that have loaded the activity during the lookback window.

Enable Floodlight activities for YouTube

Floodlight activities must be enabled to measure conversions for YouTube & partners line items. Learn more