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What is a Google Ads Data Hub

A typical pain of a marketer is to evaluate the effectiveness of display advertising (because interactions with it occur outside the advertiser's website). The classic web analytics tools cannot do this, and the rest of the tools do not provide a transparent assessment.

To solve this problem, Google launched the Ads Data Hub , a tool for retrieving media inventory data to evaluate its effectiveness. It allows you to combine display advertising data with site data and CRM.

Below I will talk about what the Ads Data Hub is and how it works.

What is an Ads Data Hub for?


There are classic view-through conversions . Most media tools let you know how many users of those who saw the banner made an order. But these tools do not show all the user's steps from viewing the banner to buying and do not take into account the purchased orders from the CRM system.

So that advertisers can combine campaign information with their own data, advertising services provide upload tools, such as Google’s Data Transfe r. Previously, it could be used to upload raw log data for every click, impression, or event, including user ID, from DoubleClick Campaign Manager (DCM) to Google BigQuery. However, in 2018 GDPR rulesbanned advertisers from uploading user data, as they interact with the publisher’s site, not the advertiser.

Therefore, Google has given advertisers the opportunity to transparently evaluate the effectiveness of display advertising without violating privacy requirements. Now User IDs are not unloaded from DCM and DPM, but they are available for working in the Ads Data Hub.

What else causes the appearance of the Ads Data Hub? For most advertisers, display advertising is an alternative to TV or outdoor advertising. That is, this is not a substitute for performance marketing, but another coverage tool. However, unlike the same TV, there are no established benchmarks in display advertising. Therefore, an advertiser needs a tool that shows which audience they interacted with thanks to display advertising.

And Google created such a tool. In the near future, most large advertisers who invest in display advertising will face the need to develop an Ads Data Hub.

How Google Ads Data Hub Works


Ads Data Hub is not an independent repository. This is a tool for working with data in Google BigQuery. In essence, the Ads Data Hub links two BigQuery projects - your own and a Google project.



A Google project stores log data from Campaign Manager, Display & Video 360, YouTube, and Google Ads. This is the same information that cannot be obtained externally due to GDPR rules.

The second project, owned by you, stores all the marketing data (online and offline) that you uploaded to BigQuery from Google Analytics, CRM or other sources. The Google team does not have access to your project.

The Ads Data Hub is an API that allows you to simultaneously request data from these two projects without uploading them at the user level. Thanks to this, you can associate all clicks and conversions with impression data and see how a particular campaign affected the conversion.

Important: the query results returned by the Ads Data Hub are aggregated up to 50 users. That is, each row in the table should contain data about 50 or more users. It is not possible to drill down to one specific user. This restriction is introduced to comply with the GDPR rules.

An example report that can be built using the Ads Data Hub


Let's say you run display campaigns on the Google Display Network and want to evaluate their effectiveness. Using the Ads Data Hub, you can combine impressions from Campaign Manager, sessions and online orders from Google Analytics, purchased orders from CRM in a single SQL query.

As a result, you will get a report that contains the following information:

  1. The name of the ad campaigns.
  2. The number of impressions for each campaign.
  3. Campaign reach is the number of users who saw the banner.
  4. Sessions of users who visited the site after viewing the banner. Moreover, the user does not have to click on the link in the advertisement. This takes into account the session and those who visited the site without a click. For example, I saw an ad, remembered it, and then found your site in a search.
  5. Clicks on the link in the advertisement.
  6. Online Conversions.
  7. Confirmed orders from your CRM.



That is, the Ads Data Hub allows you to evaluate Post-view conversions. If you were to build such a report without ADH, then there would be only those users who visited the site by clicking on the banner. You would not know anything about those who did not click, but visited the site, and also in the report there would be no real sales from CRM (yellow columns in the report).

How to use Ads Data Hub


To use the Ads Data Hub, you will need data from the site and from the CRM system in Google BigQuery, which you will combine with the data about the impressions of advertising campaigns.

You also need to configure Client Client ID transfer to Campaign Manager (formerly DCM) so that there is an identifier by which you can combine site visit data with impression information. This can be done, for example, using Floodlight .

What's next?

  1. Ads Data Hub. Google.
  2. Ads Data Hub Campaign Manager, DV360, Google Ads YouTube.
  3. Google BigQuery - CRM OWOX BI.
  4. SQL- .
  5. BigQuery, .
  6. .


Previously, to exchange information, marketers made Excel files and sent them to each other. Over time, it came to the understanding that it is better to store data in one place, and access relevant information when it is needed. So the concept of a cloud for documents appeared.

Of course, Excel continues to be used to work with data here and now. But these are two different concepts - one thing is when users connect to one source, and the other is when everyone has a copy of the data.

MarTech data has historically evolved along the same path when every MarTech service for computing and reporting required a copy of the data. If you want to build a report in GA - upload the data there, if you want to build a report on DCM - upload the data to BigQuery. The Ads Data Hub is a conceptual replacement for this paradigm.

What is the problem? Now, a marketer can upload data from Google Ads to BigQuery, and after that they will retrospectively change in the advertising service. As a result, in his BigQuery project, the data will be obsolete if not updated.

The second problem is which data to upload? There is a lot of information about display advertising. In order for a marketer to build a report once a week, you need to upload gigabytes of information to his project. Instead, the Ads Data Hub suggests connecting the SQL interface to data from Google’s advertising services. That is, you have a GBQ project. It contains your data that Google does not have (for example, from CRM). Now that you need a report with data on advertising campaigns, you simply connect them to your request and get the latest information here and now. You no longer need to store advertising data in your project. Updating them every day, when something has changed over historical periods, is also not necessary. For reports, absolutely all the data you collect is available.

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