About cross-account conversion tracking

If you have multiple Google Ads accounts, you can track conversions across all of those accounts—hundreds of accounts, if you’d like—using a single conversion code snippet (also called a "tag"). This is possible with cross-account conversion tracking.

To use this feature, you’ll want to have or create an Google Ads manager account (MCC) for creating conversion actions that you can use across your accounts.

Note: When you switch from using account specific conversion tracking to cross-account conversion tracking, based on your Manager account, campaigns targeting a specific conversion action will switch to using the MCC account's default conversion goals. Continuing to target a specific conversion action can yield inconsistent behavior, as the Manager account may not have the same goals as the serving-account. Check and ensure that your campaigns are optimizing the right goals. This also applied when moving from MCC to serving account conversion tracking.

Benefits

Cross-account conversion tracking is useful for people and businesses who manage multiple Google Ads accounts. Here are some of the benefits:
  • Fewer code snippets and reports. Create one conversion tracking tag and use it across multiple accounts.
  • Simpler, more powerful reports. Cross-account Attribution reports consolidate your data across all accounts that use this feature. You can also see how people interact with your keywords across all of your accounts before they convert. If you are using cross-account conversion tracking, use the Attribution reports in the manager account (MCC).
  • Minimize miscounts. Placing fewer tags on your site makes it less likely to accidentally count the same conversion more than once.
  • Speed up your site. Fewer tags means less HTML on your website. And that’ll speed up load times for your customers.

Example

Let’s say you own a hotel company. You use multiple Google Ads accounts to send traffic to a reservation page on your site, and each Google Ads account has its own conversion tracking tag.

So, you sign into your manager account, create a cross-account conversion action to track your hotel reservations, and add the tag to your reservation page. The same tag will then track conversions for all Google Ads accounts that are in your manager account and use this cross-account conversion.

How it works

There are four parts to setting up cross-account conversion tracking.

Create a cross-account conversion action in your manager account—just as you would any other kind of conversion action.
Add your new conversion tracking tag to your websites' conversion pages if necessary. (You’ll want to leave the old tag on your sites for now to avoid losing conversions.)
Choose the accounts for which you’d like to use cross-account conversion tracking.
After your chosen conversion window, remove your old conversion tracking tag from your site.

If your client accounts already have conversions, you can stop using those account-specific conversion actions and instead use cross-account conversion actions. Here's how the two are different:

cross-account conversion actions account-specific conversion actions
Client in a manager account (MCC) Created and managed in an individual account (non-manager)
Tracked across multiple accounts Tracked only in one account
Can apply to existing accounts within a manager account, and new accounts as they’re created Applies only to the account in which it’s created

Impact on your accounts

A Google Ads account can use account-specific conversions or cross-account conversions. It can’t use both.

So if you manage a client account’s conversion actions in your manager account, the client account can’t use its own conversion actions anymore (existing conversion statistics won’t be lost, though, and account-specific conversion actions can be used again if cross-account conversion actions are later disabled).

Structuring your accounts

If you use more than one manager account, you’ll also want to be extra thoughtful about which one you use to manage conversions for your business. Here’s are some possible structures you might want to consider:

  • If you use separate agencies for your search and display advertising: You’d probably want to set up cross-account conversion tracking in a manager account that contains all your accounts, which each agency can use.
  • If you have multiple product lines leading to the same conversion: You might want to set up conversion tracking in a manager account that manages the accounts for all the product lines.
  • If you have multiple product lines leading to different conversions: You’d want to decide whether to set up conversion tracking separately for each product line, or set up one main manager account for all of the product lines.

Keep in mind

  • Client accounts will be able to see, but not make changes to, cross-account conversion actions. Only manager accounts can make changes to these types of conversion actions.
  • Target CPA will use campaign-specific conversion actions, regardless of whether those are cross-account or account-specific conversion actions.
  • If you're using cross-account conversion tracking, you'll need to import any Google Analytics goals and transactions into the manager account that created those cross-account conversion actions. For now, any goals or transactions you already imported will continue counting conversions, but in the future, goals and transactions in the client account will no longer be supported.
  • Existing data for any account-specific conversions will always be available in Google Ads after cross-account conversions are enabled.
  • To share conversion actions across your client accounts,set up sharing from within your manager account. Conversion actions cannot be shared between client accounts.
  • Google Ads tags used for MCC accounts will take priority over account-level tags. Note that this does not apply to Google Analytics.

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