How to Integrate Google Ads and Wicked Reports

The quick process for integrating your Google Ads to Wicked Reports for automatic tracking.

How to integrate Google Ads with Wicked Reports:
Step 1 - Connect your Google Ads account(s) to your Wicked Reports account
Step 2 - Verify the Wicked Tracking Template has been added to your Google Ads account(s)
Step 3 - Verify that there is No Tracking Below the Account Level
Step 4 - Review, "What will my Google Ad UTMs look like in Wicked Reports?"

Additional Material:

(Advanced) Push Wicked Lead Conversion into Google Offline Conversion via gclid
YouTube Considerations
Troubleshooting

How to integrate Google Ads with Wicked Reports

Step 1 - Connect your Google Ads account(s) to your Wicked Reports account

Go to the Authorizations Tab
Under the Advertising Data column, locate Google Adwords. Then, click connect in the Google Ad connection box.
Select a Gmail account that has Admin rights to the ad account(s) that you wish to connect to Wicked Reports.
Then, select the Google Ads account(s) that you wish to integrate with your Wicked account
A successful connection looks like this:

Step #1 Tips:

If you don’t see your ad accounts listed, try connecting a different Gmail account and/or verify you have admin access to the account.
If you only have 1 Google Ads account for that Gmail, the wizard will connect right away without the need to select a specific Google Ad account.
If you receive any odd messages from the Google wizard, contact support.
One odd message from Google could be the “2-step verification not enrolled” message:
To fix this issue of “2-step verification not enrolled”, head on over to your Google account. You should see a notification at the top similar to this:
Click on the warning and follow the Google wizard instructions to turn 2-step on. Then, come back to Wicked and start the integration process again.

Step 2 - Verify the Wicked Tracking Template has been added to your Google Ads account(s)

Google makes it easy to track all ad clicks using their account-level tracking template. By applying this template at the account level, all clicks will pass the necessary information for Wicked Reports to automatically track and attribute clicks to leads and sales.

Auto-adding your Wicked Tracking Template:
Wicked attempts to automatically add our tracking template the first time we pull your Google Ads data. However, we still recommend adding the Wicked Tracking Template manually as a best practice:

{lpurl}?wickedsource=google&wickedid={gclid}&wickedid={creative}&wcid={campaignid}&wv=4

Follow these instructions to verify that the Wicked Tracking Template has been added to your Google Ads account. Re-run these steps on every ad account that you connected to Wicked:

Log in to Google Ads
Navigate to Settings
Click on Account Settings
Click the Tracking Template dropdown
Verify the Wicked Tracking Template has been added to the Tracking Template property. Verify that there are no spelling errors.

If the Wicked Tracking Template has not been added, then copy & paste the Wicked Tracking Template into the Tracking Template property.
Verify that Auto-Tagging is set to "Yes"
Click Save
Click the Test button. Google will randomly select 10 URLs to verify the tracking template works.

Congratulations, at this point, your Google Ads account(s) have the necessary URL Parameters for tracking.

Step #2 Tips:

If you have other UTMs in the Account Settings > Tracking Template section, then append them to the end of the Wicked Tracking template.
Redirect links will normally pass the tracking template parameters through to the final URL. But you have to verify this is happening, and if not, update the redirect software setting to allow "UTM/Link parameter pass-through". Most redirect software has this option. This is a must, it will cause huge data accuracy issues if the correct tracking template parameters do not make it to the final post-redirect page that has our tracking script.
If your marketing sends traffic to YouTube, then use Wicked Redirect links as your Landing Page URL. For example, a Facebook Ad that sends traffic to a Youtube Video or YouTube Page. This is an advanced use case, contact support to see if we can track your use case.

Step 3 - Verify that there is No Tracking Below the Account Level

When setting up & troubleshooting your Google Ads data, one of the most important things to look for is that you don't have tracking below the Account level - tracking below the account level means at the Campaign, Ad Group, or Ad level. Any tracking at these lower levels, will overwrite the Account level settings and drastically affect your Adwords reporting.

Follow these instructions to Verify that there is No Tracking Below the Account Level

Step 5 - Review, "What will my Google Ad UTMs look like in Wicked Reports?"

Since Wicked automatically adds URL Parameters, this means there is also a pre-set structure to how Wicked names your ads inside Wicked Reports. It's important for you to know this UTM naming structure. This will help you determine how best to title your Google Ads so you can filter Wicked Reports by this key information.

Please note that the pre-set structure will not be applicable for Performance Max campaigns because it is an amalgamation of many Google Ads formats into one: Search, Display, Discovery, Video, Shopping, and Local. The Adgroup and the Keyword will show up as Performance max in the Reports.

Review, "What will my Google Ad UTMs look like in Wicked Reports?"

Push Wicked Lead Conversion into Google Offline-Conversion via gclid

If you’d like to see your Wicked Reports attribution conversions and revenue inside of Google Ad Manager, active the Wicked Google Conversion Optimizer: https://help.wickedreports.com/google-conversion-optimizer-settings

YouTube Considerations

Everything in this section applies to YouTube, but there are also some additional considerations and resources available:

We can also track YouTube Discovery Ads that point to YouTube channels that then point to hosted lead capture pages. This is an advanced, detailed process, contact Customer Support for assistance.

NOTE: In-stream ads require you to manually add UTMs to the tracking params section of your ad. Adwords/YouTube is NOT applying the tracking template to these ads.

NOTE: If you add Cards to your In-Stream video Ads, you will need to add UTM tracking to the links in the Cards as the Template does not get applied to those clicks. We recommend using the same UTMs you use on the In-Stream ads, themselves

Troubleshooting

If you have followed the steps above and your clicks, leads, and sales are getting attributed to Google Ads, but NOT lining up to costs, it is possible that your UTMs are being set at the campaign, ad group, or ad level. UTMs at the lower Google ad account levels will override account-level UTM settings. You can check and fix this situation here: https://help.wickedreports.com/verify-no-tracking-below-google-adwords-account-level
Sometimes the wrong Google Ads account(s) get picked during setup. You can verify which Google ad accounts are connected to your Wicked Reports account here: https://help.wickedreports.com/verify-the-correct-google-adwords-account-is-authorized
If your Google Ads costs do not match Wicked costs for the same campaigns but are only slightly off, please check if you are using keywords on your Google Display Ads or using automatic targeting in your Google Display Ads. If you are using these, the ad costs will not match between Google and Wicked but will only be slightly different. This is normal behavior and will not significantly impact your reporting.
With the recent update to our tracking template, we have now made it possible to natively track Google Smart campaigns along with Performance MAX campaigns. Forget about uploading cost and clicks data manually anymore. You should be able to see the cost and clicks coming in from Google into the ROI report after switching to the latest tracking template mentioned above.
If you have a Discovery Campaign with the subtype of product feed, then your Google Ads integration will not pull this campaign into Wicked Reports. That is because Google's API does not currently support that subtype. Here's a list of Google API's supported subtypes. However, you still manually track these campaigns by adding UTMs and importing marketing costs into Wicked. Reach out to support@wickedreports.com if you need help with this.
If you are having tracking issues and you use Parallel Tracking you may need to modify the tracking template in Google Ads
- If your tracking template does not have {lpurl} at the beginning and you have Parallel Tracking turned on, you may have tracking issues in Wicked. To resolve, you can add the Google Tracking code to the Final URL suffix. This will pass to the landing page and Wicked will start tracking again.