Google Ads Connector

The Google Ads Connector delivers audience data to your Google Ads account using Google’s Audience Partner API, enabling you to activate segments for Customer Match advertising campaigns.

Overview

The connector uploads user lists to Google Ads, where they become available as audience segments for targeting across Search, Shopping, Gmail, YouTube, and Display campaigns. It supports creating new user lists or appending to existing ones.

Guides

Requirements

Account setup

Link your Google Ads account

You link your Google Ads account to Narrative I/O once, in Google Ads. After that you can create profiles and deliver audiences without further setup. Narrative I/O then appears under Connected products. Manage & link on that entry is where you unlink it later. Google allows the link for accounts with a history of policy compliance, a good payment history, and at least 90 days in Google Ads. See Google’s Link Customer Match partners and Google Ads.

Supported identifiers

Your data must include at least one of these identifier types, mapped to the corresponding Rosetta Stone attribute: Your data must include at least one email-based identifier or the complete set of name, postal code, and country attributes. Both can be present on the same row. For name-based matching, all three attributes are required together:

• SHA256 hashed first name and last name
• Postal code
• Country code (ISO 3166-1)

Delivering audiences

When connecting a dataset to the Google Ads connector, you choose how the audience is created:

New user list

Creates a new Customer Match user list in your Google Ads account.

Existing user list

Appends data to a user list that already exists in your Google Ads account.

API connection settings

A connection’s quick_settings choose the interface and say how the connection delivers. The fields depend on the interface.

New user list (audience_first_party_new)

The connector creates the user list in Google Ads when you create the connection.

Existing user list (audience_first_party_existing)

Existing and new rows

A connection delivers every snapshot written to the dataset after the connection is created. The historical_data_enabled quick setting decides whether the connection also delivers data that was already in the dataset when you created it:

• With historical_data_enabled set to true, the connection first delivers data already in the dataset, then keeps delivering new snapshots as they land.
• With historical_data_enabled set to false, the connection delivers only snapshots written after it was created.

How far back the first delivery reaches depends on the connector, and each connector’s guide states it. For Google Ads, historical_data_enabled delivers the dataset’s snapshots from the 30 days before the connection was created. After that, each new snapshot is delivered as it lands. Every delivery adds members to the user list, and the connection never removes them. A member leaves the list when its membership duration runs out. When you overwrite the dataset, the connection adds the rows in the new snapshot, and members that are missing from it stay in the list until their membership duration ends.

Audience membership duration

Membership duration is how long a delivered identifier remains active in the destination audience before the destination platform expires it. It is distinct from the dataset’s retention policy (which governs data stored in Narrative) and the interface’s refresh window (which governs how stale the source dataset may get). The duration is fixed when the user list is created and the connector never updates it afterward. Connections that deliver to an existing user list have no duration setting — the list keeps its current duration. Membership duration through this connector is capped at 540 days, with no “no expiration” option; a value outside the valid range falls back to the default of 540 days rather than producing an error.

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