Coop Analytics

A brand wants to run an ad campaign and direct traffic to a retailer's site. To enable more advanced bidding strategies, the brand's ad account needs to receive conversions. Usually this is achieved by adding a JavaScript tag to the website, but in this setup, the brand doesn't own the website, and a retailer may not wish to modify their website to send conversions to a 3rd party Ads account.

Coop Analytics facilitates coop agreements, by using data from the retailer's Google Analytics 360 account, to identify brand conversions and share these back with the brand for conversion reporting.

How It Works?

First, a brand and retailer come to an agreement for which products will be promoted, and share the product SKUs, and agree a set of UTM parameters.

As an example, let's say that Global Brand Inc. would like to promote a pair of socks on Retailer ABC's website. This would be the data flow:

1. Global Brand Inc. would like to promote these socks on the Retailer ABC's website:

   https://retailer-abc.com/products/global-brand-inc-socks.html

2. Global Brand Inc. set up a campaign in their own Ads account, with the agreed UTM parameters:

   https://retailer-abc.com/products/global-brand-inc-socks.html?utm_source=gbi_brand&utm_campaign=123

3. Global Brand Inc. enables Auto-tagging in their Google Ads account, so when a user clicks the link, a GCLID is also appended to the URL.

   https://retailer-abc.com/products/global-brand-inc-socks.html?utm_source=gbi_brand&utm_campaign=123&gclid=987zyx

4. Google Analytics on Retailer ABC's website will capture the GCLID and UTM parameters. See the prerequisites to ensure this behaves this way.

5. Retailer ABC sets up the Google Analytics 360 BigQuery export (or GA4 BigQuery export) in their own Google Cloud Project. Global Brand Inc. will not have access to this.

6. Retailer ABC runs the SQL scripts in this project to find conversions for products that Global Brand Inc. are advertising. These scripts then look back 30/60/90 days and determine if a click ever came from one of the brand's campaigns, by using the UTM parameters. Notes:

   • The look back window can be configured to any time period.
   • The attribution method in this code is any click, however this could be adapted to use first click or last click attribution, if desired.
   • There is flexibility as to what a conversion actually is. This code provides examples using page detail view, adding a product to basket, and making a purchase.

7. Once the converted clicks that originated from Global Brand Inc.'s campaign have been identified, the date & time of the conversion, the conversion value and the GCLID are stored in a table.

   GCLID	Conversion Datetime	Conversion Value
   abc-123	01/02/2021 12:58	11.99
   xyz-854	01/02/2021 16:12	23.98
   dkd-954	02/02/2021 09:43	11.99

8. This conversion table sits within Retailer ABC's cloud project. This table is shared with Global Brand Inc. Notes:

   • How the data is shared can be flexible:
     • The simplest solution is to create a separate BigQuery dataset that contains a view of the brand's data, and share this with the brand. This project creates this data, but does not share the data with the brand.
     • Alternatively, the data can be exported from BigQuery to Cloud Storage and that shared with the brand.
     • Or there are other ETL alternatives that could be used, if there are other specific restrictions/requirements.
   • Key point: The brand's Ads account generated the GCLIDs. A brand can report on the GCLIDs even if no data is shared. The retailer is sharing a subset of the GCLIDs back with the brand; the ones that converted.

9. Global Brand Inc. reads the data, and reports this back to Google Ads via the Offline Conversion API

Prerequisites

• The brand will pay 100% of the costs.
• The retailer must:
  • Be a Google Analytics 360 customer (the BigQuery export is only available to Analytics 360 customers) or use the GA4 BigQuery export.
  • Have Enhanced Ecommerce actions set up. This code uses the actions to identify conversions.
  • Have a Google Cloud Project with access to BigQuery.
  • Set up a custom dimension at "session" level scope, that captures the GCLID and stores it as a custom dimension, see below for more details. In GA4, the custom dimension should be set up at "event" level scope.

GCLID Custom Dimension

Google Analytics validates the GCLID values that are appended to a query string, and "invalid" GCLIDs are ignored, not stored in Google Analytics and therefore don't make it to the BigQuery export.

The GCLID is encrypted data that contains information about the Google Ads campaign it originated from.

The below example is clearly not going to be a valid value:

https://retailer-abc.com/products/global-brand-inc-socks.html?gclid=987zyx

So this is ignored.

However, it's more complicated in our scenario, as a real GCLID will be appended to the URL, but it will be from a different business's account; the GCLID comes from the brand's Ads account, but the Analytics account belongs to the retailer. As the GCLID comes from a foreign account, this is considered invalid by Google Analytics.

This problem can be solved in two ways:

1. Link the brand's Ads account with the retailer's Analytics account. Or,
2. Store the GCLID as a custom dimension with "session" level scope.

Option 1 solves the problem, as Google Analytics will now treat the GCLID as coming from a valid account. However, many brands/retailers will be uncomfortable with this account linking. As a result, this project uses solution 2 above, so the accounts are not linked and there is still separation between the businesses' Ads/Analytics accounts.

Get Started

For information on how to get started, retailers visit the retailer get started guide.

For brands visit the brand get started guide.

Disclaimers

This is not an officially supported Google product.

Copyright 2021 Google LLC. This solution, including any related sample code or data, is made available on an “as is,” “as available,” and “with all faults” basis, solely for illustrative purposes, and without warranty or representation of any kind. This solution is experimental, unsupported and provided solely for your convenience. Your use of it is subject to your agreements with Google, as applicable, and may constitute a beta feature as defined under those agreements. To the extent that you make any data available to Google in connection with your use of the solution, you represent and warrant that you have all necessary and appropriate rights, consents and permissions to permit Google to use and process that data. By using any portion of this solution, you acknowledge, assume and accept all risks, known and unknown, associated with its usage, including with respect to your deployment of any portion of this solution in your systems, or usage in connection with your business, if at all.