Author: Duane Brown
As a marketer or business owner, you need to get the most return on investment as possible from the platforms and tools you use. If Google Ads is one of those platforms, you might wonder how you can get your budget to go further (after all, who has an unlimited ads budget?). Sharing your first-party data—the data you already have from your customers—with Google Ads can enable you to do just that.
With Wix’s Zapier integration, you can automate data sharing with Google Ads to not only improve your audience lists and conversions, but also free up more time to focus on other strategic aspects of your business.
Let’s get started.
Table of contents:
Why you should share your first-party data with Google Ads
Feeding customer data to Google Ads helps you guide the machine learning algorithms that power your campaigns. The more data Google Ads has about what resonates with your customers, the more efficiently it can run your campaign, which can translate to higher ROI and decreased costs. Plus you’ll be less stressed, which is already a huge bonus.
First-party data is your life preserver as Google deprecates third-party cookies
As Google gets ready to remove third-party cookies from its Chrome browser, more businesses are starting to pay attention to their first-party data (the data you own related to customers that have made a purchase on your website).
This is because Google’s changes don’t affect your first-party data. What’s more, the privacy changes baked into Apple’s iOS 14.5 update showed many marketers and business owners how valuable all that first-party data could be in this new privacy landscape.
So, how can you leverage your first-party data?
How first-party data fuels better ad campaigns
The big reason you want to get your customer data into Google Ads is to help Google’s AI learn more about your customers. Google can only optimize your campaigns when it has accurate data. So, the more data you can feed Google’s AI, the better your ads will potentially perform.
Now, just because you feed Google this data doesn’t mean your campaigns will magically improve. You still need to build the right campaigns and manage them correctly. If you’re already on top of this and you do share your customer data with Google Ads, then you are going to enable your campaigns to work even better.
Also, when it comes to optimizing your Ads account, keep in mind that Google only looks at data over the last 30 days. So keeping your data fresh in Google Ads is another reason to do this (in addition to the time saved by automating this task).
Next, let’s look at some tools you can use to automate various aspects of campaign management and optimization.
Tools to automate ad management and optimization
There are lots of ways you can automate porting your customer data into Google Ads. Plus, there are lots of tools you can use to automate work being done in and outside of Google Ads.
While the sections after this one will focus on leveraging Zapier to automate data sharing between Wix websites and Google Ads, the tools and options below are excellent complements that are valuable in their own right.
Optmyzr
Optmyzr is excellent if you need to manage your Google campaigns and want more flexibility then what Google Ad Manager offers. You can set up more advanced rules and scripts that alert you to issues inside your Ads account. Plus, the platform also works with Microsoft and Amazon Ads, which means you have one central place to manage your different paid search campaigns.
The time savings alone is worth the price of entry. You should probably be spending at least $5,000/month to even consider using a tool like this, but it is helpful if you want something to use alongside Google Ad Manager.
Feedonomics
Shopping feeds are eCommerce brands’ bread and butter. If you run shopping campaigns (including Standard Shopping or Performance Max), then you are going to need a shopping feed. If your store has thousands of SKUs, then you would likely be better off using a third-party feed management tool to manage your shopping feed.
Feedonomics should be the first tool you look at when it comes to feed management. My agency, Take Some Risk, has used tons of tools and apps and Feedonomics is the best of the best.
For example, it has a support team located around the world, which means you can get support almost 24/7. Their team has worked on thousands of feeds and understands the value of well built shopping feeds. Their data governance product means you get alerts when something goes wrong. And, the platform’s relationship with Google gives users access to betas and alphas before many large advertisers.
Supermetrics
Reporting and pulling conversions data might be your least favorite task, but we all have to report or monitor how our campaigns perform. Tools like Supermetrics enable you to pull data from Wix, Google Ads, and many other platforms so you can build custom reports.
Let’s say, for example, that you want to pull purchase data from Google Ads but you also get offline leads on your site. You can use Supermetrics to pull data from multiple sources and centralize that data in a report you have built in Google Sheets or Looker Studio. Unlike Zapier, that moves data from platform A to platform B, Supermetrics is about pulling data from platform A and B, and letting you use it to build reports in your tool of choice.
Zapier
If you need to connect two platforms together and there is no native integration between the two platforms, then Zapier should be your first port of call. There are tons of competitors on the market these days but Zapier is the grandfather of the industry.
My agency has been using it the last few years and we love how simple and easy it is. If I have data in Wix and I want to send that data to Google ads, Zapier can create that connection between the two platforms and automatically send the data on a regular basis.
The customer data you’ll send to Google Ads
As I mentioned before, you generally want to upload customer data to Google Ads to either help build audience lists or increase the conversion data the platform has access to. There are limits on what data you can upload to Google Ads, which includes (but is not limited to):
Email address
Phone number
First name
Last name
City
State/Province
Country
Zip/Postal code
Attribution data (e.g., currency and conversion names)
The above is the minimum data that Google Ads will accept. Sometimes you can upload other data, but it will depend on what you are trying to do. If you want to upload something else, you may be trying to do something more advanced, which I don’t recommend for your first attempt with tools like Zapier.
How to use Zapier to automate data sharing between Wix and Google Ads
Let's say you want to update your Google Ads audience lists once per day: Perhaps you have a remarketing list of people who abandoned their shopping carts and you want to show them ads after leaving your online store, or you may have customers that already purchased items and you want to stop showing them ads from your brand on Google.
In both cases, you’ll want to keep our audience lists updated to make sure that you are showing (or not showing) ads to the right people. Let’s walk through how to do this with Wix and Zapier.
Getting started
First, start by heading to Wix’s Zapier page.
From here, use the search bar to search for Google Ads (the app you want to send your data to).
Of course, you could also send your data to Microsoft Ads, your CRM tool, or any number of other platforms, but for this article, we’re going to keep the focus on sending data from Wix to Google Ads.
Under the “Create your first workflow” section, Zapier lists the most popular workflows (or what they call “recipes”). For this particular example, the one we want is “Add Contact to Customer List With Email in Google Ads for Automation Rule in Wix,” as it lets us add our customer data from Wix into Google Ads to build an audience list.
Once you click on the workflow card, you will see the integration screen for this workflow.
Click on “Try this template” to be taken to the workflow dashboard, where you can log into your platform and set up the workflow. The first thing to do is sign into your Wix account.
Then, you will need to sign into your Google Ads account. If you happen to have a Google Ads Manager account, you will need to designate which sub-account has the audience list you want to automate updating. You only need to do this if this is the first time you are using Zapier.
Next, look to set up filters or other actions to tell Zapier how it should handle your data when it goes from Wix to Google Ads.
There may be certain scenarios where you do not want to import your data, such as when you only want to import data based on a type of email address (e.g., Gmail vs. Yahoo) or only data from customers that spend a certain amount of money with your business. Once you pick the filter option, you can tell Zapier how to filter your data.
If I want to filter by email provider, then I can tell Zapier to filter based on what the email address does (or does not) contain. For Google Ads, I only want to share the email addresses that end in “gmail.com” because Google has a hard time matching non-gmail addresses to Google Accounts (Google needs to match the email address so they know who they are showing the ads to). I will simply pick “(Text) Contains” and then in the next box, add “gmail.com.”
This will tell Zapier to only send customer data to Google Ads if it’s a Gmail address. Save the changes and then run a test workflow. If you don't get any errors, you are ready to publish your workflow and have your audiences (with Gmail accounts) uploaded in Google Ads.
This is just one example use case—there are tons of other ways you can use Wix customer data and Google Ads together.
Ways to use Wix customer data and Google Ads together
Here are some of the other amazing options that could help save your business time while optimizing conversions:
Send offline conversions to Google Ads
If you have products that have longer sales cycles, you can capture that customer data in Wix and then, when that person does purchase, you can send that customer data to Google Ads using Zapier.
You will need to combine Zapier and offline conversions tracking in Google Ads, but this is a great way to automate this longer sales cycle and upload the conversion data. This works well if your business also gets a lot of phone calls before someone buys.
Update Google Ads campaign statuses
If someone makes a new purchase on your site, you could add a rule to update your campaigns in Google Ads.
If you have just run low on inventory for a popular product, you can have Zapier pause your campaign so you don’t advertise something that is nearly out of stock.
Generate Google Ads reporting
If Google Ads is your only marketing channel, you could set up a workflow to generate a report every time you make 10 sales. That way, you can keep track of how well your business is doing as you grow in sales each week.
Track leads
If your business uses an intake form, you can have Zapier send that lead data to Google Ads so you can track which of your campaigns is driving a lead on your site.
Of course, you can still send and track purchases on your site, but this helps you see which campaigns are driving a lead and then a purchase for your business.
Online privacy is evolving—leveraging your first-party data helps your business evolve, too
There are lots of ways you can capture customer data on your Wix site. The first thing you always want to do is figure out what customer data (AKA first-party data) you have access to, and then consider how you can use that data to your advantage in your Google Ads account. Once you do that, you can look at how to automate that data to help drive better results and more efficient campaigns for your business.
Duane has lived in 6 cities across 3 continents and visited 55+ countries globally. He works with brands including LARQ, Birdies, Pela Case, FTD, and Tiger Companies. Him and his team, at Take Some Risk, help eCommerce brands grow through strategy, PPC marketing, and data. Linkedin