DocumentationExperience PlatformSource Connectors Guide

Google Ads (V2)

Last update: September 8, 2026

CREATED FOR:

  • Developer

Google Ads (V2) is an Adobe Experience Platform paid media source connector that ingests advertising account, campaign, ad group, ad, asset, experience, and performance data from the Google Ads API into Experience Platform.

The connector maps Google Ads data to standardized paid media Experience Data Model (XDM) structures, allowing you to analyze Google Ads data alongside data from other advertising networks, web properties, commerce systems, and customer applications.

Google Ads (V2) uses read-only access to retrieve reporting data and advertising metadata. It does not create, modify, or delete Google Ads resources.

Example use cases

Use case
Goal
How Google Ads (V2) helps
Cross-channel advertising analysis
Compare Google Ads performance with Meta Ads and other paid media channels.
Ingests Google Ads data into common paid media XDM structures with standardized identifiers across each entity level.
Media mix modeling and attribution
Evaluate the contribution of paid media to business outcomes.
Provides campaign and advertising performance data, including impressions, clicks, spend, conversions, and conversion value for downstream analysis.
Campaign and budget optimization
Understand which campaigns, bidding strategies, and targeting configurations produce the best results.
Ingests campaign metadata, budgets, bidding strategies, channel types, statuses, dates, and selected targeting criteria.
Creative and asset performance
Identify which creative assets, ad formats, and experiences perform best.
Ingests ad-level creative metadata, including asset associations, types, and performance labels.
Performance Max analysis
Analyze Performance Max asset groups and their associated assets.
Uses Performance Max asset-group data to represent asset-group performance and experience relationships where Google Ads does not expose a traditional ad-level structure.
Customer journey analysis
Relate advertising engagement to web, commerce, CRM, and other customer events.
Makes Google Ads data available in Experience Platform for use with downstream analytics and activation workflows.

Prerequisites

Before connecting Google Ads (V2) to Experience Platform, ensure that you have the following:

Configure permissions on Experience Platform

You must have both View Sources and Manage Sources permissions enabled for your Experience Platform account.

Contact your product administrator if you do not have the required permissions. For more information, read the access control UI guide.

Configure Google Ads API access

Experience Platform manages the OAuth 2.0 authorization flow for Google Ads (V2). You do not create a Google Cloud project, OAuth client, or refresh token.

You must have:

  • A valid Google Ads developer token.
  • Access to the Google Ads advertiser account that you want to ingest.
  • Permission to access the relevant advertiser accounts through Google Ads or a Google Ads manager account.

Manager-account access

If the advertiser account is accessed through a Google Ads manager account, also provide the appropriate manager customer ID as the loginCustomerId.

The loginCustomerId is not required when the OAuth-authorized user can directly access the target advertiser account and no manager hierarchy is needed.

Google Ads (V2) enumerates accessible accounts, identifies manager accounts, traverses the manager-account hierarchy, and resolves the advertiser accounts available for ingestion.

Gather required credentials

To connect Google Ads (V2) to Experience Platform, provide the following values.

Credential
Description
developerToken
The Google Ads developer token used to authorize API requests.
loginCustomerId
The numeric customer ID of the manager account used to access the advertiser account. This credential is required for manager-account access.

Authentication and account discovery

Google Ads (V2) uses OAuth 2.0 to authorize access to the Google Ads API. Experience Platform manages the authorization flow, so you do not configure OAuth scopes or permissions on the Google Ads side.

After you authorize your account, Experience Platform uses your developer token to access Google Ads reporting resources. For manager-account configurations, the connector resolves the account hierarchy and identifies the advertiser accounts available for ingestion.

The account-discovery workflow includes the following operations:

  1. Enumerate accounts accessible to the authorized user.
  2. Determine whether an accessible account is a manager account.
  3. Traverse the manager-account hierarchy.
  4. Identify non-manager advertiser accounts.
  5. Use the appropriate loginCustomerId when requests are routed through the manager-account hierarchy.
  6. Retrieve account metadata such as account ID, account name, currency, and time zone.

Google Ads (V2) performs read-only API operations. It does not issue mutate, create, update, or delete requests against Google Ads resources.

Data selection and ingestion

Google Ads (V2) uses Google Ads Query Language (GAQL) to retrieve account metadata, campaign metadata, and reporting data.

The connector uses resource-specific queries to retrieve the attributes, segments, and metrics required for each entity. The connector uses SearchStream for reporting resources and large result sets where incremental row processing is beneficial.

The supported query inventory includes resources such as:

  • customer
  • customer_client
  • campaign
  • campaign_budget
  • campaign_criterion
  • geo_target_constant
  • ad_group
  • ad_group_criterion
  • ad_group_ad
  • ad_group_ad_asset_view
  • ad_group_ad_asset_combination_view
  • asset
  • asset_group
  • asset_group_asset
  • change_status

Performance metrics are retrieved using date-based segments such as segments.date.

Schema configuration

Google Ads (V2) maps source data to standardized paid media XDM structures. The connector organizes the data by entity level so that metadata and performance metrics can be joined across account, campaign, ad group, ad, asset, and experience records.

Entity
Primary Google Ads resources
Data represented
Account
customer, customer_client
Account ID, account name, currency, time zone, manager status, and account metadata.
Campaign
campaign, campaign_budget, campaign_criterion
Campaign name, status, advertising channel, subtype, objective, budgets, bidding strategy, dates, URL tracking, and targeting configuration.
Ad group
ad_group, ad_group_criterion
Ad group ID, name, status, bids, targeting, keywords, placements, and campaign relationship.
Ad
ad_group_ad
Ad ID, ad type, creative content, destination URLs, delivery status, policy and review information, and campaign/ad group relationships.
Asset
asset, ad_group_ad_asset_view, asset_group_asset
Asset ID, asset type, text, image or video metadata, dimensions, usage, performance label, and associated ads or campaigns.
Experience
ad_group_ad_asset_combination_view, asset_group, asset_group_asset
Derived creative composition, served assets, headlines, descriptions, calls to action, landing page URLs, and experience relationships.
Summary metrics
Resource-specific metrics.* fields and segments.date
Date-level impressions, clicks, spend, conversions, conversion value, CTR, CPC, CPM, video metrics, and other supported performance measures.

Identifier conventions

The V2 mapping defines platform-qualified identifiers for paid media entities. For example:

  • The connector derives account identifiers from the Google Ads customer ID.
  • Campaign identifiers combine the Google Ads customer ID and campaign ID.
  • Ad group and ad identifiers include their parent hierarchy.
  • Asset identifiers combine the Google Ads customer ID and asset ID.
  • The connector derives experience identifiers from creative-combination or asset-group context.
  • Hierarchy paths represent the relationship between account, campaign, ad group, ad, experience, and asset entities.

Performance Max data

Performance Max campaigns do not always expose the same entity relationships as traditional campaign types.

For Performance Max data:

  • asset_group represents the primary grouping of assets.
  • asset_group_asset represents asset-to-group relationships.
  • Asset-group metrics provide the context required to analyze asset performance.
  • Asset groups act as an experience proxy when a native experience entity is not available.

Data limitations and considerations

Consider the following limitations when planning your Google Ads (V2) implementation.

Resource-specific metric support

Google Ads does not expose every metric for every resource. For example, some resources do not support metrics or segments, while others support only a limited set of metrics.

Metric availability also varies between ad, asset, experience, campaign, and Performance Max queries.

Derived experience records

Google Ads does not provide a single universal experience entity equivalent to the experience model used by the paid media XDM schemas.

The connector derives experience records from available ad, asset-combination, and asset-group data.

Video metadata

The Google Ads API provides video identifiers and related asset references. However, some media properties, such as video duration, codec, bitrate, frame rate, and audio presence, are not directly available through the Google Ads API.

These fields are null unless an approved enrichment service is added.

Asset availability

Asset metadata and performance support vary by asset type. For example, image and text metadata is available directly, while some video properties require additional enrichment.

Google-specific fields

Google Ads concepts without a direct paid media XDM equivalent are represented using additionalDetails or set to null, according to the approved mapping.

Enum mappings

The connector maps Google Ads API enum values to XDM values using exact matches, close semantic matches, or approved fallback values. Unsupported, unknown, deprecated, or unspecified values are skipped or set to null.

Next steps

After you have confirmed your Google Ads credentials and account-access model, continue by creating a connection to Google Ads using the Experience Platform UI.

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