Track mobile app conversions with Floodlight

Floodlight gives you insight into the actions that users take after they view or click on ads. There's no special setup for Floodlight on the mobile web. You can traffic your ads and set up your Floodlight conversion action and tags for any web page, whether users will be seeing that page on a desktop or a mobile device.

Some setup is needed if you want to use Floodlight for app installs or in-app activities. This article explains what you need to do to make Floodlight work in an app.

Due to differences in cookies and device ID settings, there may be times when conversions can't be measured directly. In some cases, Search Ads 360 uses machine learning and historical data to model conversions.

This article discusses implementation details for measuring Floodlight conversions in mobile apps. The Google tag is not intended to work in mobile apps.

About Floodlight in apps

With in-app Floodlight conversion action, you can learn more about what actions users take within mobile apps after they interact with your ads, similarly to how you can do so on a website. You can track installs of your app or activities that take place in the app, such as purchases or logins, which make it easier for you to determine the effectiveness of mobile app campaigns. View-through and click-through conversion data is available in Reporting, enabling you to view desktop and mobile campaign performance in one place.

In-app activities can be attributed to display and video ads that run in other apps. These attributed conversions appear in the standard conversion metrics available throughout Search Ads 360. For conversions attributed to ads that ran on web sites or on other devices, these metrics are reported within the cross-device conversions report.

To implement Floodlight inside apps, first you’ll need to create and configure your Floodlight conversion action in Search Ads 360. Once your tags are ready, we provide two different options for tracking in-app installs or activities with them.

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Who's involved
There are two partners that make in-app Floodlight work:
  • The manager account or sub-manager account that uses Search Ads 360 to serve ads in apps and wants to use Floodlight to track installs or other app activities for their promoted app back to their ads.
  • A media partner or publisher that has available inventory in apps.
Values passed to tags
Before you can attribute app installs or activities back to ad impressions and clicks in apps, the partners need to work together to ensure that user-resettable device identifiers and other values are passed to both Floodlight tags and the ad tags running in apps. Search Ads 360 uses the identifiers to uniquely identify a user and attribute app activities back to the in-app ads they viewed or clicked on.
  • dc_rdid=: User resettable device identifiers in the form of IDFA for iOS or advertising ID (AdID) for Android. This parameter is required. The publisher must pass a value into this parameter in order to enable in-app conversion tracking. The values should be the unhashed, raw value. We will only accept values passed securely over SSL-enabled tags.
    Note: We strongly recommend using the dc_rdid parameter for device IDs instead of the legacy parameter dc_muid, which accepts uppercase MD5-hashed IDFA, Android ID, and AdID values.
    • SSAID is available for non-Play Android devices in China.
  • tag_for_child_directed_treatment=: Accepts a value of 0 or 1. A value of 1 indicates that this particular request may come from a user under the age of 13, under COPPA compliance.
  • dc_lat=: Accepts a value of 0 or 1. A value of 1 means that the user has enabled the “Limit Ad Tracking” option for IDFA or AdID in order to opt out of interest-based ads and remarketing. If "Limit Ad Tracking" is off, the value is 0.
Make sure that the HTTP header user agent is the same as that of the app where the conversion activity took place. This is especially important when making server-to-server calls to Floodlight.

Set up Floodlight in apps

Ensure ad tags pass proper values from publishers
Tracking in-app conversions requires that specific values are passed into ad tags by the app publisher when the ads are served.
Advertisers or agencies should send example ad tags to the app publisher and get confirmation that the publisher can pass parameters into the ad tags, particularly into the required  data-dcm-resettable-device-id / dc_rdid parameter. Usually, the app publisher will support site-macros to provide these values.
Below are samples of what ad tags might look like once the publisher passes the values needed for in-app ads:
The beginning of a sample ins tag (the preferred option for mobile environments):
<ins class='dcmads'
 style='display:inline-block;width:320px;height:50px'
 data-dcm-placement='N9200.284657.MYSITE/B7841342.2'
 data-dcm-rendering-mode='script'
 data-dcm-click-tracker='${CLICK_URL}'
 data-dcm-limit-ad-tracking=0
 data-dcm-resettable-device-id='38400000-8cf0-11bd-b23e-10b96e4ddddd'
 data-dcm-child-directed=0>
 <script src='
https://googletagservices.com/dcm/dcmads.js'></script>
</ins>

A sample standard tag (used for image banners):

<A HREF="https://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/jump/N9200.284257.MYSITE/B7841142;sz=320x50;ord=[timestamp]?"> <IMG SRC="https://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/ad/N9200.284257.MYSITE/B7841142;sz=320x50;ord=[timestamp];dc_lat=0;dc_rdid=38400000-8cf0-11bd-b23e-10b96e4ddddd;tag_for_child_directed_treatment=0?" BORDER=0 WIDTH=320 HEIGHT=50 ALT="Advertisement"></A>

The beginning of a sample JavaScript tag (typically used for HTML5 or rich media banners):

<SCRIPT language='JavaScript1.1' SRC="https://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/adj/N9200.284657.MYSITE/B7841342.2;sz=320x50;ord=[timestamp];dc_lat=0;dc_rdid=38400000-8cf0-11bd-b23e-10b96e4ddddd;tag_for_child_directed_treatment=0?"> </SCRIPT>

A sample pre-fetch tag (used for in-stream video and audio ads):

VAST 2.0 pre-fetch tag

https://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/pfadx/N9200.284657.MYSITE/B7841342.2;kw=[keyword];sz=widthxheight;ord=[timestamp];dc_lat=0;dc_rdid=38400000-8cf0-11bd-b23e-10b96e4ddddd;tag_for_child_directed_treatment=0;dcmt=text/xml;dc_sdk_apis=[APIFRAMEWORKS];dc_omid_p=[OMIDPARTNER]

VAST 3.0 pre-fetch tag

https://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/pfadx/N9200.284657.MYSITE/B7841342.2;kw=[keyword];sz=widthxheight;ord=[timestamp];dc_lat=0;dc_rdid=38400000-8cf0-11bd-b23e-10b96e4ddddd;tag_for_child_directed_treatment=0;dcmt=text/xml;dc_sdk_apis=[APIFRAMEWORKS];dc_omid_p=[OMIDPARTNER];dc_vast=3

VAST 4.0 pre-fetch tag

https://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/pfadx/N9200.284657.MYSITE/B7841342.2;kw=[keyword];sz=widthxheight;ord=[timestamp];dc_lat=0;dc_rdid=38400000-8cf0-11bd-b23e-10b96e4ddddd;tag_for_child_directed_treatment=0;dcmt=text/xml;dc_sdk_apis=[APIFRAMEWORKS];dc_omid_p=[OMIDPARTNER];dc_vast=4

A sample tracking ad image tag for impressions:

<IMG SRC="https://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/trackimp/N7480.169443360.MYSITE/B7967415.105398014;dc_trk_aid=278142637;dc_trk_cid=56651190;ord=[timestamp];dc_lat=0;dc_rdid=38400000-8cf0-11bd-b23e-10b96e4ddddd;tag_for_child_directed_treatment=0?" BORDER="0" HEIGHT="1" WIDTH="1" ALT="Advertisement">

A sample tracking ad tag for clicks:

http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/trackclk/N7480.169443360.MYSITE/B7967415.105398014;dc_trk_aid=278142637;dc_trk_cid=56651190;dc_lat=0;dc_rdid=38400000-8cf0-11bd-b23e-10b96e4ddddd;tag_for_child_directed_treatment=0

The dc_rdid=, tag_for_child_directed_treatment= and dc_lat= parameters are included in tags for all placements. The publisher passes the value into all of the keys at serve time.

Fire Floodlight tags when tracking app activities
Search Ads 360 provides two different methods for agencies and advertisers to use Floodlight tags for apps. The manager account or sub-manager account should work with the developer of the promoted app to confirm that either of these methods are supported.

Use a GET request to make Floodlight calls directly

You can use a GET request to make Floodlight calls directly from your app or server code whenever there’s an install or other app event. This method may be preferable if your app developer has custom code or doesn’t use Google Tag Manager. The advertiser's app can make a GET request to Floodlight using the corresponding activity values (src, cat, type). Be sure that the necessary values are passed to parameters, particularly the required dc_rdid= value.

Learn how to Add Floodlight activities to Google Tag Manager containers in Campaign Manager 360 Help Center.

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