Connecting Google Ads

Connecting Google Ads does two things: it lets us read the campaign and keyword behind each click, and it lets us send back what the resulting call was worth.

The second is what changes your results. Smart Bidding optimises towards whatever you tell it a conversion is — so telling it "a call happened" produces more calls, while telling it "this call became £14,000" produces more revenue.

Connecting

1. Go to Connections, find the Google Ads card under Advertising, and press Connect. That opens the Google Ads page, where everything below happens and where the connection's settings live afterwards.
2. Google asks you to sign in and approve access. This happens on Google's own site — that is what makes it a genuine consent screen, and it is the one point where the product hands you off deliberately.
3. You are returned to the connection's page in the dashboard, with the result at the top of it — connected, or the reason it did not finish. Then we ask which advertiser account to use.
4. Choose or create a conversion action — see below, this is the step to get right.

What we ask permission for

Two scopes, and nothing else:

• Read your reporting — clicks, campaigns, keywords.
• Upload conversions — the revenue a call produced.

We never change budgets, bids, creatives, targeting or campaign settings, and we never read your billing details. If you use a manager (MCC) account, connect with a login that has access to the client account you want tracked.

The conversion action

This is where uploads silently fail if it is wrong. Google will accept data against the wrong kind of action and then ignore it.

In Google Ads: Goals → Conversions → New conversion action → Import → Manual import using API or uploads. Not a website conversion, not a phone-call-from-ads conversion — those measure something Google observes itself, and cannot receive values from us.

Proofbell can create a correctly configured one for you during setup, which is the safer route. If you create it yourself, set the category to a lead type and leave "use the default value" off — the whole point is that each conversion carries its own value.

Dry run comes first, and stays until you turn it off

A new connection starts in dry run. Conversions are built and validated against Google's API, and the response is recorded, but nothing is written to your bidding data.

That is the default for a reason worth stating plainly:

• A wrong value column in a CSV pushes fabricated revenue into a live algorithm.
• A wrong currency assumption misstates every deal by the exchange rate.
• Neither can be undone by deleting rows afterwards, because Smart Bidding has already learned from them.

So: import a batch, check the numbers on the attribution screen against your own CRM, and ask us to switch dry run off when you are satisfied. Connections shows which state you are in.

What actually gets sent

Deliberately minimal:

• the click identifier Google gave us when the visitor arrived
• the conversion value and currency
• when it happened

No phone number, no recording, no name, no email. Google already knows which click it issued; it does not need to know who rang.

If you use strict consent

With strict consent enabled, a conversion is withheld until consent is recorded for that visitor. Instructing us to upload is instructing a transfer of your customer's data to a third party, and you need a lawful basis for it — the setting exists so the platform can help you honour that rather than quietly ignoring it.

"Not finished", or "setup incomplete"

Both mean the same thing: we hold valid credentials but no advertiser account or conversion action has been chosen, so nothing can be uploaded. It is called out because most tools show a green tick for this state and then push nothing for weeks. The card on Connections says Not finished and its button reads Finish setup; the Google Ads page itself says setup incomplete beside the heading and shows you which of the two choices is outstanding.

Reconnecting

Safe at any time, and sometimes necessary — Google expires access if a password changes or permissions are revoked. Reconnecting keeps your existing settings: the advertiser account, timezone and conversion action all survive, and only the credentials are replaced.

Timezones, and why we ask

We store your Google Ads account's own reporting timezone, because Google's click data is bucketed by date in that timezone. Using ours instead would query the wrong day for any click near midnight and return nothing — which looks identical to a click Google filtered as invalid. Discovery captures it automatically.

Microsoft, Meta and others

Not built yet. Revenue imported by CSV is still recorded and attributed within Proofbell — it simply is not pushed back to those platforms, so their bidding cannot use it.