What are Floodlight Activities (Floodlight Tags)?
Floodlight is the conversion tracking tool for Google Marketing Platform, with Floodlight activities including specific events or actions taken by users on your website that you’d like to track. It also forms an important part of a company’s Measurement Plan.
Typically using cookie or mobile IDs (as a user ID) to recognise impressions, clicks or other activities of given website and app users, Floodlight uses a small piece of javascript code called a Floodlight activity (also known as the DoubleClick Floodlight activity), to enable the collection of unique information of onsite behaviour by website users. For each event you want to track on your website, you would need to create a new Floodlight activity.
3 strategies for leveraging Floodlight activities in the GMP
As a feature specific to the Google Marketing Platform, Floodlight activities allow marketers, practitioners and business leaders to:
- Track and report on conversions - the actions of users who visit your site after viewing or clicking on one of your ads and convert from either a counting activity or sales activity (see table below)
- Set up action or behaviour-based remarketing audiences - combining lists of website visitors who have performed specific actions on your site and allowing you to target these users with Data-driven Marketing campaigns.
- Inform your Data-driven Creative - Use your Floodlight activities to provide signals on which variations of creative to serve to your audience and personalise their experience when interacting with your brand.
Floodlight Counting Methods
Counter Activities
Sales Activities
- Standard: Counts every conversion.
- Unique: Counts the first conversion for each unique user during each 24-hour day.
- Per session: Counts one conversion per user per session. You can define the length of a session for your site.
- Transactions: Counts all conversions, plus the total number of sales that take place and the total associated revenue.
- Items sold: Counts each conversion, plus the total number of items sold and the total associated revenue.
Floodlight activities only records the conversions of users who have viewed or clicked on a Campaign Manager 360 (CM360), Display & Video 360 (DV360), or Search Ads 360 (SA360), ad within a specific time period that has been specified at the advertiser level, this is known as the lookback window. Lookback windows can be set to a maximum of 90 days and at an advertiser, campaign, placement, and site level.
Importantly, the integration across Google Marketing Platform products – Campaign Manager 360 (CM360), Display & Video 360 (DV360), and Search Ads 360 (SA360), utilises the Floodlight conversion tracking system to enable accurate tracking of cross-channel conversion funnels throughout the full customer journey without duplication.
Maximise your data collection with Custom Floodlight Variables
Custom Floodlight Variables facilitate the capture and collection of more advanced information (beyond visits and revenue) than standard tag parameters. With a maximum of up to 100 custom variables per Floodlight configuration, Custom Floodlight Variables can pass through additional information such as shipping or billing postcode, membership or participation in reward programs or product information to Floodlight Tags. This allows more detailed reporting in Campaign Manager 360’s Report Builder and the ability to build more specific, targeted audience lists across Campaign Manager 360 (CM360), Display & Video 360 (DV360) and Search Ads 360 (SA360), in turn, this provides an opportunity to create more effective programmatic, search and Data-driven Creative campaigns.
Set up Remarketing Audiences with Floodlight activities
With remarketing ads being 70% more likely to convert, it is a proven strategy for driving online success. Floodlight activities and configuration provide you the ability to create remarketing audience lists based on the actions and behaviours taken by visitors while on your site in which you can remarket personalised ads tailored around those onsite behaviours.
If you’re using Custom Floodlight Variables, you will need to create a remarketing attribute for each custom variable you’ll use. Remarketing attributes connect Campaign Manager 360 to Studio and provide a place to store attribute settings, such as how many or how long to store cookie values within the 30 day lifespan.
As with other Data-driven Creative campaigns, creating a remarketing feed to match your creative (including the headline, images or videos, and exit URL) with the values passed to your Custom Floodlight Variables allows continued personalisation of your remarketing at scale.
Conclusion
Floodlight activities (Floodlight tags) when incorporating Custom Floodlight Variables provide the foundation to build detailed reporting, creative signals, and audience lists for your digital media & search campaigns within Google Marketing Platform. As a key step within your Measurement Plan, it’s important for marketers, practitioners, and business leaders to work together in understanding the actions and behaviour they would like to track onsite and how this translates to a Floodlight plan.
By developing a detailed, accurate Floodlight plan, this allows you to create more detailed cross-channel conversion funnel across the entire customer journey and enable targeting of specific website and app users with programmatic, search and Data-Driven Creative campaigns.
For support or consultation with your Floodlight Measurement Planning, please get in touch with the FiveStones team today.