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Conversions with cart data

Conversions with cart data is an extension of purchase tracking that tells Google Ads which items were in each order, at what price and in what quantity.

How it works

A plain purchase conversion tells Google Ads only that an order happened and what it was worth. With cart data, the purchase event also carries an items array: each product’s ID, price and quantity, plus an optional order discount.

Google reads cart data only from purchase events and only for items in the Merchant Center account linked to Google Ads. Item IDs must match the feed’s id exactly. The Google tag or Google Tag Manager sends the data; Tag Manager maps the values from the dataLayer. A purchase imported from Google Analytics works too.

Google then reports what sold. For Shopping ads, that includes cross-sell: sales of products other than the one in the ad. With the cost of goods sold (COGS) from the feed, Google adds gross profit. Our guide to cart data and COGS in Google Ads covers the setup.

Where you see it

  • Google Ads: revenue, gross profit, units sold, average cart size and cross-sell revenue, by campaign and by product sold. Our guide to the cart items cross-sold report covers Shopping cross-sell.
  • Conversion diagnostics: a downloadable list of item IDs that did not match the feed.

Example

Example store, not client data.

A shopper clicks the tableware shop’s Shopping ad for a dinner set and orders it for 600, plus two glasses at 75 each. Without cart data, Google Ads records one purchase worth 750. With it, Google sees 1 lead unit (the advertised set) and 2 cross-sell units worth 150. The feed gives a COGS of 390 for the set and 50 per glass, so gross profit = 750 − (390 + 2 × 50) = 260.

Not to be confused with

  • Conversion value — one amount for the whole order. Cart data adds the items behind it.
  • Transaction ID — the order number that prevents double counting. It says nothing about what was bought.

Right and wrong readings

  • Wrong: “Gross profit in the report covers the whole order.” Right: only items with a COGS value in Merchant Center count. If the glasses had none, the order would show 600 − 390 = 210 of gross profit next to 750 of revenue.

Sources