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Welcome to the help center for Search Ads 360, a platform for managing search marketing campaigns.  While the help center is available to the public, access to the Search Ads 360 product is available only to subscribing customers who are signed in. To subscribe or find out more, contact our sales team.

Data differences

Differences in ad and keyword metrics

Search Ads 360 attributes metrics to ads on a best effort basis. In most cases, Search Ads 360 is able to attribute each click, visit, and action to both an ad and a keyword. However, several scenarios are known to prevent Search Ads 360 from attributing metrics to ads, so some discrepancies are expected, particularly for visits and conversions. 

Here are some of the scenarios that can cause ad metrics to be lower than keyword metrics:

  • Your campaigns include unsupported ad formats (for example, image ads or video ads): You can create placeholder keywords to track conversion data for unsupported ad types.

  • Ads are not synced to Search Ads 360 and only exist on the engine: Please sync your accounts in Search Ads 360 to ensure that all ads are on Search Ads 360.

  • You've been testing a clickserver URL without clicking on a live ad.

  • Keywords contain clickserver URLs from the previous version of Search Ads 360: These legacy URLs have the following format (note the absence of the ds_url_v= parameter):
    https://clickserve.dartsearch.net/link/click?lid={ifsearch:43000000000000001}{ifcontent:43000000000000002}

    These keywords don’t send Search Ads 360 the proper IDs needed to attribute metrics to an ad. You can remove the keyword and recreate it, but note that the historical metrics will remain with the removed keyword. Also, the new keyword will need to go through the engine’s approval process, so there may be a gap after removal and recreation where the keyword is not live. Please contact support for more information about this option.

  • Other technical issues that prevent Search Ads 360 from attributing metrics to ads.
Search Ads 360 reports don't display metrics for removed ads and keywords by default, but you can change the report settings to display data for removed items.

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