Tracking Your Portal with Google Ads and Google Analytics

What It Does

If you advertise your portal, you want to know which visits turn into sign-ups and new records. The Tracking tab in your portal's settings adds your own Google tag to the portal, so those show up in your Google Ads or Google Analytics account.

You give us an ID. We build Google's tag from it, so there is no code to paste.

Turning It On

1. Open your portal's settings and go to the Tracking tab.
2. Turn on Track this portal with Google.
3. Add a Google Ads ID (it looks like AW-123456789), a Google Analytics ID (it looks like G-AB12CD34EF), or both.
4. Save.

The tag then loads on every page of the portal, for people who are signed in and people who are not.

Your own preview of the portal, opened with the Preview button, is never counted. You can test your portal without creating conversions.

What Your Portal Sends

Your portal sends four events, with fixed names. The contents of a record are never sent.

Event	When	Sent with it
page_view	Someone opens a page of the portal	The page's address, the address the visitor came from, and a title made of the page name and your portal's name. Never a record's name.
sign_up	Someone registers through your sign-up form	Nothing else
login	Someone signs in	How they signed in: with a code, or with their email only
record_created	Someone signed in creates a record	The table's name. Nothing from the record itself.

Both addresses are sent without your users' search text or filter choices. Only the parameters Google uses to match a visit to an ad or a campaign are kept, such as gclid and utm_source.

Google Analytics can add events of its own on top of these, such as scrolls, outbound clicks, form interactions and site search, when Enhanced measurement is on in your Analytics property. Those are collected by Google's tag, not sent by your portal, and you switch them on and off in Analytics.

Counting an Event as a Google Ads Conversion

With a Google Ads ID set, each event on the Tracking tab has a box for a conversion label. Where you fill one in, the portal sends that Google Ads conversion as well as the event. Leave a box empty and only the event is sent.

record_created takes one label per table. On a marketplace portal, a new listing can be a conversion without a new message being one.

Find Your Conversion Label

1. In Google Ads, go to Goals, then Conversions, and create a conversion action for a website (or open one you already have).
2. Choose to set the tag up yourself, and look at the event snippet Google shows.
3. Find the line that starts send_to. It looks like AW-123456789/AbC-D_efG-h12_34-567.
4. The part after the slash is the label. Paste it into the box on the Tracking tab. If you paste the whole value, we keep just the label.

If You Only Use Google Analytics

A Google Analytics ID needs no labels. In Analytics, mark the events you care about as key events, then link Analytics to Google Ads and import them there.

The Cookie Prompt

Ask visitors before using cookies is on by default. With it on:

• A visitor sees a short prompt at the bottom of the portal asking whether Google's cookies are OK.
• Until they accept, Google's cookies stay off. Google still receives the events, without cookies, and uses them for estimates.
• Their answer is remembered on that device. A Cookie settings link in the portal lets them change it.

Google requires consent from visitors in the EEA, the UK and Switzerland before ad tracking. If you are sure none of your visitors are there, you can turn the prompt off. The tag then uses cookies for everyone without asking, and Google receives no consent signal, so it may leave European visitors out of your audiences.

You can change the prompt's wording, or translate it, on the Labels tab under Cookie prompt (tracking).

Two Settings to Check in Google

Some of what Google collects is decided in your Google account, not in your portal.

Turn off history-based page views in Analytics. A portal moves between pages without reloading, and we send a page view for each one. Analytics can also send its own, which counts every page twice and uses the browser's page title, which on a public portal includes the record's name. In Analytics, open Admin, Data streams, your stream, Enhanced measurement, and under Page views untick Page changes based on browser history events.

Leave automatic user-provided data detection off unless you have consent for it. Google Ads and Analytics can be set to look for email addresses on a page. Your portal's pages show your users' details to them when they are signed in. This is controlled in your Google account, under the Google tag's settings, and we cannot switch it off from the portal.

Embedded Portals

The tag also loads when your portal is embedded in another site. Browsers restrict cookies inside an embed, so conversions measured there are less reliable than on the portal's own address.

Duplicating a Portal

A copy of a portal keeps your IDs and labels but starts with tracking turned off, so a portal you copied to experiment on does not report conversions.

Next Steps

• Sharing Your Portal - Make a portal public so people can find it
• Portal Labels - Change or translate the cookie prompt
• Custom Domains - Serve the portal on your own domain