You can use the new Search Ads 360 experience to report on activity that occurs before customers land on your site, such as impressions and clicks on social ads, as well as activity that occurs after clicking social ads, such as visits and Floodlight conversions.
Import social performance and engagement metrics into the new Search Ads 360 experience
Because the new Search Ads 360 experience can’t pull metrics directly from social engines, you need to periodically sign into your PMD or social engine, export metrics and upload those metrics into the previous Search Ads 360 experience. Some PMDs can schedule an export and have metrics automatically sent to the previous Search Ads 360 experience on a regular basis.
Currencies in social accounts
As with other types of accounts, you specify a currency when you create a social engine account. The new Search Ads 360 experience assumes that the metrics that you upload are in the same currency as the engine that you’re uploading them to.
Track visits and Floodlight conversions
After you onboard a social engine account, the new Search Ads 360 experience can start attributing visits and Floodlight conversions to your social ads. You don't need to import this data since the new Search Ads 360 experience collects it for you.
When you use the new Search Ads 360 experience to report on social campaigns, you'll see the number of conversions attributed to each social campaign, ad group and ad. You can also see this information in Campaign Manager 360 Paid social reports and attribution reports. And because you're using Floodlight to track conversions, all of the visits and conversion data is de-duplicated regardless of how many channels contributed to the conversions.
Track using a PMD (or Facebook Marketing Partner)
Here's how Search Ads 360 tracks visits and conversions if you use a PMD to connect Search Ads 360 with a social engine:
- When you link a Search Ads 360 social engine account to a PMD, the PMD wraps the URLs in your social ads with a Search Ads 360 clickserver URL. Some PMDs also associate a viewtracker URL with social ads. The viewtracker URL tracks impressions for use by Campaign Manager 360 Paid social reports and attribution reports.
- A customer clicks a social ad and the clickserver URL redirects the click to Search Ads 360.
- Search Ads 360 records a visit and forwards the customer to the landing page originally specified in the social ad.
- If the customer visit causes a Floodlight tag to fire, Search Ads 360 reports a conversion and attributes it to the social ad.
Track without a PMD
Here's how Search Ads 360 tracks visits and conversions if you don't use a PMD:
- After you create a social engine account, download campaigns from the social engine and upload them into Search Ad 360. Search Ads 360 will add its clickserver URLs to the ads. Search Ads 360 will also add a viewtracker URL so Paid social reports and attribution reports in Campaign Manager 360 can include impression metrics for social ads. Then you can upload the modified campaigns back into the social engine.
- A customer clicks a social ad and the clickserver URL redirects the click to Search Ads 360.
- Search Ads 360 records a visit and forwards the customer to the landing page originally specified in the social ad.
- If the customer visit causes a Floodlight tag to fire, Search Ads 360 reports a conversion and attributes it to the social ad.
Entities are hidden until reporting data becomes available
Your campaigns, ad groups and ads will be hidden until reporting metrics become available through click tracking and importing metrics. Once users engage with your ads, the new Search Ads 360 experience will show your campaign entities.
The generated items in the new Search Ads 360 experience are for reporting purposes only. You can't view or change their settings from the new Search Ads 360 experience.
Names may be shortened in the new Search Ads 360 experience
To prevent its tracking URLs from becoming too long, the new Search Ads 360 experience sometimes limits campaign, ad group and ad names to 20 characters. The names are not changed in the engine itself. The shortened names only appear in reports generated using the new Search Ads 360 experience and Campaign Manager 360.
If the shortened names aren't unique, use the engine ID or the new Search Ads 360 experience ID to distinguish campaigns, ad groups or ads.