How and Why to Connect Google Ads with Zapier

Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords) is one of the biggest online advertising platforms. Every day, it’s used by millions of businesses to attract leads, drive sales, or monetize content.

In this article, we’ll look at how you can use Zapier Google Ads integration (and the benefits to doing that). We’ll review the available Google Ads Zapier triggers, actions, and third-party tools integration ideas. 

So, let’s start by looking at why you’d want to connect the two.

Why Integrate Google Ads with Zapier?

There’s a plethora of reasons why you should make Zapier a part of your marketing workflow. And, it’s no different when we look at the benefits of integrating your Google Ads account with it. The key ones to do that include: 

• You can keep all leads in one place. When you connect Zapier to your lead-gen Google ads campaigns, you can move each new lead to your main database. This allows you to move, tag, and segment all leads inside one tool. This, in turn, helps avoid information chaos and speeds up the lead generation process.
• Faster lead processing. With Zapier, all leads can be sent right to the tools used by your sales team. Thanks to that, your sales reps can start processing those leads even faster. And, with the ability to tag and segment those leads, they always know which leads to focus on. 
• Accurate offline reporting. One of Zapier’s Google Ads actions gives you the ability to send offline conversions from your PoS or CRM right to Google Ads. This gives you more accurate data and helps you better understand the ROI of your campaigns.
• Higher ROI. By automating a part of your Google Ads advertising, you save hours of your team’s time. This, together with better lead processing and the ability to add and remove customers from lists, helps you drive the ROI up. 
• Create accurate campaign goals. Thanks to the campaign status action, you can start and stop campaigns from outside of Google Ads. This lets you use data from third-party tools to create even more accurate campaign goals.

Of course, the above are not the only reasons to connect your Google Ads account to Zapier. With the right Zaps, your team can save your team plenty of time, allowing them to focus on higher-level stuff. The Zaps can also improve data flow and help keep your sales and marketing teams aligned.

But, to enjoy all the benefits of a Google Ads Zap, you’ve got to build it first. And it all starts with choosing the right trigger.

Google Ads Zapier Triggers

Even though the platform offers plenty of different campaign types, there are just two Google Ads Zapier triggers

• New campaign. This trigger is useful especially for reporting and management purposes. For example, whenever a new campaign is created, you can ask Zapier to create reminders for your marketing team to watch and optimize it. These can come in the form of calendar events and/or management tasks.
• New lead form entry. An extremely useful trigger. Use this to pass Google Ads leads straight to your CRM, marketing automation, or sales management tool. Thanks to its instant trigger type, the Zap will trigger as soon as you get a new lead. This alone can significantly speed up lead processing. 

Google Ads Zapier Actions

If you think there are way too few triggers, the number of actions should, at least partially, make up for it. You can choose from eight Google Ads action events, split into two categories.

First, there’s the Create category:

In this category, there are six different Google Ads Zapier actions to choose from:

• Adding a contact to a customer list with email. This action allows you to add emails to customer lists that you can then use for targeting. Note that if you plan to use the list in Gmail ads, you should use a Zapier filter to filter out non-Gmail addresses.

• Adding a contact to a customer list. Use phone numbers, email addresses or other allowed identifiers. Note that while you can choose multiple identifiers, only one can be present in each Zap run. 

Interestingly, Google Ads recognizes several phone number formats out of the box. Of course, should you need to, you can always use a Zapier formatter to format phone numbers.

• Creating a customer list. Automatically create a new customer list. 
• Removing a contact from the customer list. Remove selected contact from an existing customer list. Useful for keeping your lists clean or moving contacts between different lists.
• Sending offline conversions. This step is critical for reporting offline conversions accurately. There are two things you need to be aware of when sending offline conversions to Google Ads: 

1). Add a filter to continue only if GCLID exists. Without it, Google won’t be able to create an offline conversion. 

2). If the conversion event takes less than 24 hours, you’ll need to add a delay step before sending the conversion. 

• Setting campaign status. This is a very useful step if you’re planning to manage your campaigns from outside of the Google Ads console itself. It lets you enable or pause a campaign. 

Then, there’s the Search category. There are just two action steps in this category: 

There, we can pick one of two Zapier actions:

• Find a campaign by name. This is a required prerequisite if you plan to use the “set campaign status step dynamically. 
• Find a customer list. An action similar to the above one. But, rather than searching for a campaign, it lets you find a customer list.

Now that we’ve reviewed the available triggers and actions – let’s see how to connect the two tools. 

Connecting Google Ads to Zapier

Usually, setting up a Zapier integration is super straightforward. Simply select the tool when setting up the trigger, log in or provide an API key, and you’re all set. 

However, unlike many popular tools, Google Ads requires you to authorize Zapier in Google Ads, before you can finish the setup. Here’s how to do that. 

First, log into your Google ads account. Then, go to Tools and Settings > Setup > Linked Accounts. 

Next, scroll down to “Other popular products” or type Zapier in the search bar. If there already is a Linked Zap account, you’ll see the following:

If there’s none, hit “Details”:

Next, hit the Link Zapier button in the window that appears:

Then, select Authorize: 

And, in the next step, hit the Create data integration button: 

Once that’s done, you should see the following: 

Next, the process looks just like usual. First, add a Google Ads step in Zapier. Then, select Connect a New Account and log into your Google account associated with the Google Ads account that you want to connect. 

Once that’s done, you’re all set to start creating sample workflows. 

Sample Google Ads Zapier Workflows 

One of the things about Zapier automation is that one Zap idea often sparks another. So, once you create one workflow, you start discovering dozens of things that you could automate. In this quick guide to Google Ads and Zapier integration, we’ll look into four popular use cases. 

Automating All Post-Campaign-Creation Steps

First, let’s look at the most obvious Zap – automating a set of repetitive tasks that happen once you create a new campaign. These could include: 

• Creating a new task in your project management tool to finish the setup.
• Assigning that task to the right person
• Creating a new Google Sheets row with a note about the campaign or a new sheet to track campaign data in. In our case, we do the latter by copying an existing worksheet.
• Letting your team or VA know that you set up the campaign & created the task.

And, here’s what the sample setup could look like: 

First, we create the campaign and a new Trello task to optimize the campaign in the future. Next, Slack adds a new Sheet in Google Sheets where we can store campaign data. Lastly, we send a Slack notification to the right team member about the task and the campaign.

Initiating Processing of a New Lead

This is the second Zap in the list triggered by Google Ads. But this time, we want to trigger the automation whenever we get a new lead. This allows us to start processing the leads right off the bat. We can then use Zapier to move them to a CRM, Sales Management tool, or autoresponder. 

Here’s what a sample setup could look like: 

First, we ping the marketing or sales team Slack channel to let the team know there’s a new lead. Next, we add the new lead to our main database. In our example, we use Airtable, which is probably the most convenient way to store leads.

In the next step, we add the lead to Active Campaign and then to Salesforce. Naturally, the tools that you use here will depend on your automation tool stack.

Note that some of the tools that you’re using may feature a built-in Google Ads integration. If they do, it can be a very convenient way of moving lead data from Google ads right to the tool.

The problem is that its convenience comes at a cost. First, it usually has fewer options than a Zapier integration. Moreover, it doesn’t allow you to use it inside a workflow with other third-party tools the way Zapier does.

With Zapier, you can have a quick overview of all the tools involved. Additionally, you can re-use some of the data that you used to set up previous steps.

Setting Campaign Status 

The next Zap allows you to automatically enable or disable campaigns. To do that, you can use a whole set of tools, including: 

• A Google Calendar. With Zapier, you can use Google Calendar to create an automated Google Ads campaign schedule. For example, you can change the campaign status whenever an event starts or ends. This allows you to automatically enable and disable Google Ads campaigns.
• A Project Management Tool. Use this automation to manage the status of your campaign right inside or outside of the campaign tool. 
• Slack. With Slack, you can start or pause Google ads campaigns right inside Slack. You could either use a special channel or phrase to do that (or both). You could even set dynamic automation. It could use Zapier filters and Zapier Formatter Text to filter message content and search for the right campaign to start or pause. And with Paths, you could choose to either start or stop the campaign in one Zap. 

Here’s a sample Slack-based workflow. Of course, depending on your needs it can be more (or less) complex:

Cleaning Up Customer Lists

One other thing you can automate is a customer list cleanup. There are several scenarios where such automation may come in handy: 

• Moving a customer to another segment inside your marketing automation tool. Doing this could remove the customer from one list and move them to another. What’s important is that with the right setup, both things can be done fully automatically. 
• Removing the customer from your list. This is useful whenever you remove a customer whose subscription expired.
• A customer becomes a recurring one. Similarly, if a customer turns into a recurring one, you might want to add them to another list. There are other conditions that you might want to use. For example, you might have a separate list for customers beyond a certain spending level. 

Here’s what an example Zap might look like in the simplest setup: 

Start Automating Your Google Ads Campaigns with Zapier

Google Ads is a robust and highly advanced advertising platform. With the right setup, there’s a lot you can automate right inside your Google Ads dashboard. 

And with Google Ads Zapier integration, you can enhance your setup with fully automated workflows.

Of course, just like most tools, Google Ads is rarely the only tool you’ll use in your setup. If you’d like to discuss the most optimal setup – or need help with creating your Zap, consider hiring a Zapier consultant. 

Visit this page to schedule a free consultation and let’s talk about your business and automation needs.