Google Ads integration

Developer assistance needed

You’ll need help from your development team to set up the integration. Please share this guide with them.

Google Ads integration lets you sync Pushwoosh audiences to a Google Ads account as Customer Match audiences. Use it to target or exclude users in ad campaigns and add paid ads as another channel in your customer journey.

Use cases

Use this integration to:

• target high-value users in multiple channels to increase purchases or engagement
• retarget users who are less responsive in other channels
• build suppression audiences so loyal customers do not receive unnecessary ads

Prerequisites

Before you connect Google Ads, make sure:

• You have the Admin role in your Pushwoosh account. See Manage user access and permissions for how roles and permissions work.
• You have a Google Ads account with access to a Customer Match audience source.
• Your Google Ads account has Customer Match enabled — Google enables it per account after a manual review, so a newly created account may not have it yet.

Caution

Google has approved Pushwoosh for Test Access to the Google Ads API only — production access has not been granted yet. Connecting an account starts the same OAuth flow a production integration would use, but syncing audiences to a live Google Ads account does not work yet. Treat this page as a preview of the setup flow, not a working integration.

Set up Google Ads in Pushwoosh

1. In Pushwoosh, go to Settings > 3rd party integrations.

2. In the Google Ads card, click Connect.

3. Sign in to your Google account, then grant Pushwoosh access to your Google Ads accounts.

4. Select the ad accounts you want to connect.

Note

This list only shows ad accounts the Google user you signed in with has direct access to. An account managed only through a Google Ads manager account (MCC) does not appear here, even if that user administers the MCC — sign in with a user who has direct access to that account instead, or connect the MCC account itself (see below).

You can connect either a client ad account or the manager (MCC) account itself. Connecting the MCC account does not give you a Google Ads audience to sync to — Google does not support Customer Match audiences on manager accounts. Connect the client account that will hold the audience instead.

After setup, you will be redirected to the Google Ads page in Pushwoosh. The connected ad accounts table lists each account with its name and ID.

Open the three dots at the end of a row and choose Remove ad account to delete that ad account from the list in Pushwoosh.

Manage connected ad accounts

On the Google Ads page, click Manage accounts to open the dialog. Use the toggle on each row to include or exclude that ad account from the integration. Click Apply to save changes or Cancel to close without saving.

Note

Google Ads has no separate field-mapping step. Pushwoosh always sends hashed email, hashed phone number, and MADID for each user, whichever exist on the profile — the same identifiers Google’s Customer Match requires, already hashed to the format Google expects.

Sync audiences in journeys

The Audience sync point in Journey Builder links your journey to a Google Ads Customer Match audience. Every time a user reaches that point, Pushwoosh asks Google to either add them to the audience or remove them from it.

To configure audience sync:

1. Open Journey Builder.

2. Add an Audience-based entry. In Audience source, choose a Pushwoosh segment or list that defines who enters this journey.

3. Add the Audience sync point.

4. Under How to sync users info to the ad audience, pick one option:

   • Add users to audience
   • Remove users from audience

5. In AD PLATFORM, choose Google Ads.

6. In Google Ads account, select the connected ad account.

7. In Audience, select the Google Ads audience.

8. Click Apply to save the point or Cancel to close without saving.

9. Finish configuring the journey, then launch it.

Behavior and error handling

• Google matches a user only by hashed email, hashed phone, or MADID — there is no tag-based fallback. A user with none of these identifiers on their profile is skipped and continues the journey.
• Sync to Google is asynchronous: the Audience sync point accepts the user and moves them to the next step immediately, then applies the add or remove in the background. A delay between reaching the step and the change appearing in Google Ads is expected.
• If the selected ad account is disconnected when a profile reaches Audience sync, the journey stops for that profile and Pushwoosh sends system and email notifications.
• Google does not use an audience for targeting until it has about 1,000 matched users. A smaller audience keeps accepting syncs and reports success, but Google will not show ads to it until it crosses that threshold.

Audience sync statistics

After launch, open statistics for the Audience sync step to see entry volume, adds and removals, and skipped profiles. For metric details, see Audience sync in Customer Journey statistics.