Integrating Google Ads on Clarisights

Connect your Google Ads accounts to monitor campaign performance, keywords, search terms, and creative assets across every campaign type — including Performance Max — alongside the rest of your marketing stack. This article covers the full integration: connection steps, hierarchy, dimensions, metrics, segments and breakdowns, PMax-specific behavior, and asset reporting.

At a glance

Prerequisites

• An active Google account that has access to the Google Ads customer accounts you want to connect — either as a direct user on each account or as a user on a Manager (MCC) account that owns them

• Permission to authorize third-party apps with your Google account (no domain-level OAuth restrictions blocking the https://www.googleapis.com/auth/adwords scope)

• Pop-up blocker disabled for app.clarisights.com for the duration of the OAuth flow

Steps to Connect

Step 1 — Start the connection from Clarisights

In Clarisights, go to Integrations and click + Connect under the Google Ads tile.

[TODO: Screenshot needed — Integrations page with the Google Ads tile and Connect button]

Step 2 — Sign in with Google and authorize Clarisights

A pop-up will open Google's sign-in screen. Sign in with the account that has access to your Google Ads customer accounts (or to the parent MCC) and grant Clarisights the requested permissions.

⚠ Common error: The pop-up never appears or closes immediately. → A pop-up blocker is preventing the OAuth window. Allow pop-ups for app.clarisights.com and click + Connect again.

⚠ Common error: "This app is blocked" / "Access blocked: authorization error". → Your Google Workspace admin has restricted third-party app access to the adwords scope. Ask your admin to allowlist Clarisights or use a Google account without the restriction.

Step 3 — Pick the accounts to connect

After authentication, Clarisights crawls every Manager (MCC) tree the user can access and shows two lists:

• Ad Accounts — individual customer accounts the user has direct access to (not via an MCC).

• MCC Accounts — Manager accounts the user has access to. Click the + next to an MCC to expand it and reveal the customer accounts inside.

Tick the customer accounts you want to bring into Clarisights, click Add to Selection, and repeat across MCCs as needed.

[TODO: Screenshot needed — account selection screen with Ad Accounts and MCC Accounts lists]

⚠ Common error: An expected MCC or customer account is missing from the list. → The Google user you authenticated with doesn't have access to that account. Either add the user to the account in Google Ads (Tools & settings → Access and security) or re-authenticate with a different Google account.

Step 4 — Confirm

When your selection is complete, click Connect Accounts. Clarisights will register every account you selected and start the initial 30-day backfill.

[TODO: Screenshot needed — "Connect Accounts" confirmation step]

Verify the connection

• Go to Integrations → Google Ads. Each connected account should show a "Connected" status, and you can enable, disable, or refresh the OAuth token from the same row.

• You'll get an in-app notification once the 30-day backfill finishes (typically within a few hours, depending on account size).

• Quick start: create a new report, add Google Ads as the data source, and add Account · Campaign · Impressions · Clicks · Cost.

Data available

Hierarchy

How Google Ads' native levels map to the standard Clarisights levels:

Manager (MCC) accounts are not their own reporting level — they're surfaced as the Linked Manager Accounts attribute on the Account level. If a customer account sits inside a chain of MCCs (e.g. MCC-1 → MCC-2 → Account), all parents are stored as a comma-separated list.

Dimensions

Account

Campaign

Ad Group

Ad

Keyword

Creative Asset

Creative Assets are creative elements (images, videos, headlines, descriptions, CTAs, sitelinks, structured snippets, etc.) attached to ads. They sit just below the Ad level and cross-cut Ads — the same asset can serve in multiple ads.

Dimensions marked (Super Dimension) are computed by Clarisights and are not directly available in the Google Ads UI.

Segments & breakdowns

Segments are breakdown dimensions Google Ads exposes for slicing campaign data along orthogonal axes (geography, device, time of day, etc.). They appear in the dimension list with a (Breakdown) suffix.

Most segments are stored at Campaign level. Search Terms, Age Range, and Gender are stored at Ad Group level. Segments cannot be joined with Analytics channel data (Google Analytics, Custom Analytics, Adobe) — they pair only with Google Ads metrics on the same widget. Segment, Location, and Audience reports require manual enablement (contact your Clarisights CSM).

Metrics

Core delivery

Conversions

Quality & engagement

Asset-level metrics

Asset-level metrics are available for Responsive Search Ads (RSA), Performance Max, Discovery Carousel / Multi-Asset / Video Responsive ads, and App Ads. Availability of individual metrics varies by ad type — e.g., RSA exposes Impressions only, while PMax and Discovery formats expose the full set.

Custom conversions

Every custom conversion you've defined in Google Ads is fetched automatically and surfaced under the metric group Adwords All Conversions. Custom conversions with the same name across multiple ad accounts are also rolled up into account-aggregated metric groups, which is handy when accounts are split by geo or product line.

Performance Max (PMax)

• Full PMax support (added February 2026): ad-group and ad-level hierarchy for Performance Max campaigns.

• Asset-level performance for PMax creative assets — images, videos, headlines, descriptions, long headlines, and CTAs.

• Search Terms segment at the Ad Group level for PMax campaigns.

• Ad-group stats are rolled up to ads to keep widgets readable. PMax doesn't expose ads natively — Clarisights synthesizes a "dummy ad" record so the campaign hierarchy stays consistent across PMax, Search, Display, and other campaign types.

• Asset Performance Label (Best / Good / Low) is surfaced as a dimension on the Asset level.

Special reports

Three reports require manual enablement — contact your Clarisights CSM to turn them on:

• Audience Report — campaign- and ad-group-level audience-targeting performance.

• Location Report — campaign-level location-targeting performance.

• Segment-driven reports — Search Terms, Region, Metro / DMA, Device, Network, Top vs Other, Click Type, and Hour of Day. Once enabled, available as breakdowns on any widget.

Limitations & known constraints

• Ad Name not available for: Responsive Display Ads (RDA), App Ads, App Engagement Ads, App Pre-Registration Ads, and Shopping Product Ads. Google's API does not expose ad-level names for these campaign types.

• Segment, Location, and Audience reports require manual enablement — not on by default; ask your CSM to turn them on.

• MCC tree access required: customer accounts must remain within the MCC tree the integration is bound to. Accounts moved outside the tree stop syncing.

• Token revocation stops sync — re-authenticate via Integrations → Google Ads.

• Auction Insights not supported (Google API limitation).

Operating notes

• Refresh schedule: hourly with daily reconciliation against Google's finalized reporting numbers.

• Backfill: 30 days of historical data on first connect; you'll get an in-app notification once it completes.

• MCC traversal: full tree walk under the authenticating user. Multi-MCC customer chains are stored once with all parents listed in the comma-separated Linked Manager Accounts dimension on the Account level.

• Currency: amounts are pulled in the account's native currency and converted to your reporting currency. Both converted and local-currency variants of cost metrics are available.

• Adding new customer accounts: when you create or gain access to a new Google Ads customer or MCC, re-open Integrations → Google Ads to refresh the account picker and add it.

• Credential rotation: OAuth tokens auto-refresh. Re-auth is needed only on Google password change, access revocation, or a Workspace policy update.

Need help?

When contacting support from the in-app messenger, please include:

• The integration name and customer ID (Integrations → Google Ads)

• The exact error message or screenshot

• The step where the issue occurred (OAuth pop-up, account picker, post-connect data)

• When the issue started, and whether it affects all accounts or a specific MCC / customer