When it comes to measuring success in Google Ads, most retailers still fall into the same trap: chasing revenue while ignoring profitability.
Revenue tells you how much you sold.
Profit tells you whether it was worth it.
Now, with Google’s Conversions with Cart Data feature, advertisers can bridge this gap—tracking product-level data and Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) directly inside their campaigns. It’s a crucial shift for marketers who want to move beyond vanity metrics and start optimising media spend based on actual business outcomes.
Here’s how it works—and why the brands who adopt it early will have a serious advantage.
What Is Conversions with Cart Data?
Conversions with Cart Data is an enhancement to Google Ads’ standard conversion tracking. It allows advertisers to submit:
- Individual product SKUs purchased
- Quantities
- Product prices
- Cost of Goods Sold (COGS)
Rather than just telling you that a sale happened, it shows you what was sold, how much it sold for, and how profitable it was.
This data feeds into your Google Ads account, offering deeper reporting across:
- Performance Max
- Shopping Ads
- Search Campaigns (linked to Merchant Center)
Why Conversions with Cart Data Is a Must-Have
Google’s Conversions with Cart Data helps advertisers send detailed, product-level purchase data back to Google Ads, including revenue, COGS, and profit metrics.
Key Capabilities:
- Product-level attribution for every sale
- Profit-based metrics like gross profit & margin
- Cross-sell insights and full basket analysis
- Supports Shopping, Performance Max, and Search campaigns (with some limitations)
Top Benefits:
- Understand which products are selling after ad interactions.
- Analyse cross-sell trends—which ads lead to sales of different products.
- Identify top-performing items that increase cart value.
- Measure actual profit, not just revenue.
- Unlock cart-level insights for deeper optimisation.
Setting Up Cart Data Tracking: Requirements To Get Started
To activate Conversions with Cart Data, you’ll need:
- A website or app you can edit (or a developer who can).
- Google Ads or SA360 conversion tracking
- Conversions via Google Tag, Tag Manager, GA4, or Firebase
- Merchant Center feed with COGS values (cost_of_goods_sold)
- Google Merchant Center linked to Google Ads
Implementation involves tweaking your conversion code to pass cart data parameters (like SKU, price, quantity, and COGS) into your existing Google Ads conversion actions.
Testing is critical—incorrect mapping between cart data and conversions will lead to reporting inaccuracies.
Additional Requirements:
- Use a Google tag or Google Tag Manager.
- Ensure biddable purchase conversions.
- For profit reporting, include cost_of_goods_sold (COGS) in your Merchant Center feed.
Note: Only sales from Merchant Center IDs linked to your Google Ads account will be processed.
How COGS Changes Optimisation Strategy
Once COGS data flows into Google Ads, you’re no longer optimising towards just Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). You can start to optimise toward Profit per Acquisition (PPA) or Margin-Adjusted ROAS.
This unlocks smarter strategies, such as:
- Bidding more aggressively on high-margin, high-conversion SKUs.
- Reducing investment in low-margin products that erode profit even when they sell.
- Structuring campaigns by margin tiers—isolating hero products and scaling profitable segments faster.
Suddenly, it’s not just about “what sells,” but “what sells profitably.”
Unlocking Advanced Reporting & Optimisation Metrics
Once your cart-level data is submitted, Google Ads integrates product-level COGS and displays true performance metrics, based on real profit, not just clicks and sales volume.
Attributed Sales Metrics
Here’s a breakdown of the essential metrics —and what each one reveals:
- Orders: Total number of purchase conversions.
- Revenue: Total sales value (post-discounts)
- COGS: Cost of goods sold for those orders.
- Gross Profit: Revenue minus COGS—your raw profit.
- Gross Profit Margin: Percentage of revenue that’s profit.
- Average Order Value: Average revenue per order.
- Average Cart Size: Average number of items per order.
Lead vs. Cross-Sell Breakdown:
- Lead Revenue: Revenue from the advertised product
- Cross-Sell Revenue: Revenue from other products bought in the same sale
- Lead Gross Profit / Units / COGS: Focused on what was directly promoted
- Cross-Sell Gross Profit / Units / COGS: Products bought as a result of the ad
Common Pitfalls to Watch Out For
1. Missing or inaccurate COGS data
If your cost inputs aren’t maintained accurately, your profit reporting will be meaningless. COGS must be updated regularly, especially for dynamic inventory businesses.
2. Poor implementation
Make sure cart data parameters are mapped correctly across your checkout, tracking tags, and Google Ads conversion actions. Always validate before scaling.
3. Misreading cart-level vs. SKU-level data
Remember: a profitable cart doesn't mean every product in the cart is profitable. SKU-level visibility is key to make precise decisions.
Why Profit-Based Optimisation Is the Future
In a media environment where acquisition costs are rising and platform automation (like Performance Max) is taking over campaign execution, feeding smarter data into your ad platforms is becoming the real competitive edge.
The retailers and e-commerce brands who optimise towards margin, not just sales volume, will grow sustainably and scale faster—because they’re measuring success based on the metric that actually matters: profit.
Conversions with Cart Data is a small change with a big impact. And it’s where smarter performance marketing begins.
Ready to Get Started?
- Implement or update your Google Ads conversion tracking.
- Link your Google Merchant Center and add COGS data.
- Enable cart data reporting.
- Watch your insights—and profits—start to grow.
- Want help setting it up? Drop a comment or contact us for step-by-step assistance.
If you’re serious about profit-driven marketing, implementing Conversions With Cart Data allows you to move past vanity metrics and make strategic decisions based on real-world product sales and profitability.
Need a fresh perspective? Let’s talk.
At 360 OM, we specialise in helping businesses take their marketing efforts to the next level. Our team stays on top of industry trends, uses data-informed decisions to maximise your ROI, and provides full transparency through comprehensive reports.
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