Enable reporting on profit margins for Conversions with Cart Data

The new Search Ads 360 can optionally estimate the profits you earn from each transaction. To report on profit margins, you must provide the cost of goods sold (COGS) feed attribute in your Google Merchant Center product feed. Learn more about how to create a feed.

How does the COGS attribute work

COGS represents the cost of the product you are selling. The new Search Ads 360 uses this attribute to compute the profit margin on each product, calculated as profit = revenue - COGS.

If you don’t want to have precise COGS data for your products, but still want to see profit reporting, you can set a product’s COGS attribute to an approximated value. For example, you can estimate your COGS as 80% percent of the product price. Learn more about the COGS attribute.

How to provide COGS data

To include data about the profitability of products in the new Search Ads 360 reports:

1. Make sure the cart data parameters in your Floodlight transaction tag specifies a value for each product's price.
2. Add a custom attribute to your Merchant Center XML or TSV feed that reports your cost for each product:
   • Set the attribute name to cost_of_goods_sold.
   • Set the attribute type to float in an XML feed and decimal in a TSV feed.

   In an XML feed, the attribute should follow this pattern:
   <[prefix]:cost_of_goods_sold type="float">[value]</[prefix]:cost_of_goods_sold>

   In a TSV feed, the attribute definition in the header column should look like this:
   c:cost_of_goods_sold:decimal

3. For each item in your feed, specify a value for the cost_of_goods_sold attribute.

   Make sure the value is in the same currency as the price that you report from your Floodlight transaction tag.

For example, you can specify the wholesale cost of the product before tax, shipping, and advertising costs:

• XML: <c:cost_of_goods_sold type="float">55.0</c:cost_of_goods_sold>
• TSV:

  c:cost_of_goods_sold:decimal

  55.0

When your Floodlight tags report the sale of a product, the new Search Ads 360 looks up the product's cost of goods sold from your Merchant Center account and makes the data available for reporting. This makes it possible to report on profit from the new Search Ads 360 without including data about cost on your site.