Connect Google Ads to Shopify: Where to Find Your Customer ID and Conversion Action ID

Most destinations in Converlay connect the same way: click “Connect,” sign in, pick an account from a dropdown, done. Google Ads doesn’t work that way, and until recently the setup screen didn’t say why—it just asked for a Customer ID and a Conversion Action ID with placeholders that looked suspiciously like real, already-filled-in values. Merchants would authorize their Google account, see two empty text fields, and reasonably assume something was broken.

Nothing was broken. Google Ads conversion tracking genuinely does require two IDs that you have to copy in by hand, for reasons specific to how Google’s APIs are gated. Converlay v2.38.2 doesn’t remove that requirement—it can’t—but it finally explains it, and fixes a guide bug that was hiding half the instructions. This post covers both: why the manual step exists, and exactly where to find the two IDs it asks for.

Why Google Ads Is Different From Your Other Destinations

When you connect Converlay to GA4, the app authenticates with your Google account and then provisions everything itself—it lists your GA4 properties and data streams, and creates the Measurement Protocol credential behind the scenes. That’s possible because the GA4 Admin API lets an authorized app enumerate a user’s properties.

Google Ads has no equivalent for what Converlay needs. Server-side conversion delivery goes through Google’s Data Manager API, which accepts events but cannot list which Google Ads accounts or conversion actions belong to you—that lookup lives in the separate Google Ads API, and reading it requires Basic-access developer token approval that Converlay does not (and, for a tool serving thousands of independent Shopify merchants across thousands of separate Google Ads accounts, realistically cannot) hold. So instead of a dropdown, you copy two identifiers out of your own Google Ads account and paste them in. It’s a one-time, under-a-minute step—but only if you know where to look.

The Two IDs Google Ads Conversion Tracking Needs

Both fields matter for a different reason, and mixing them up is the most common way this step goes wrong.

Customer ID — which Google Ads account

Your Customer ID is the 10-digit number that identifies your Google Ads account itself (not your Google login—most people have one Google account managing several Ads accounts, or vice versa). Converlay uses it to route conversions to the right account:

1. Sign in at ads.google.com.
2. Your Customer ID is shown at the top right, next to your account name, formatted like 123-456-7890.
3. Enter it in Converlay without the hyphens: 1234567890.

Conversion Action ID — which conversion gets credited

The Conversion Action ID identifies a specific conversion action inside that account—the thing Google Ads’ bidding algorithms actually optimize toward. Every event Converlay sends to Google Ads is recorded as one conversion of the action you specify here, so this is the field that decides whether a Shopify purchase shows up as a “Purchase” conversion feeding Smart Bidding, or nowhere at all.

1. In Google Ads, go to Goals → Conversions → Summary.
2. Open the conversion action you want Converlay to report to (create one first if you don’t already have a Purchase conversion action set up).
3. Look at the page URL while that conversion action is open—the numeric ID appears in the ctId= parameter.
4. Copy just the number into Converlay’s Conversion Action ID field.

If either field is missing or malformed, Converlay now catches it before you can enable the destination: the Customer ID has to be exactly 10 digits, and the Conversion Action ID has to be numeric. That validation existed before v2.38.2; what was missing was any explanation of why you’re typing these in at all, or where to go looking.

What v2.38.2 Actually Fixed

A founder testing their own store’s onboarding flagged the Google Ads step as confusing enough to look broken, and a closer look turned up a real defect on top of the missing explanation:

• The step now explains itself. A short note above the fields— “Google doesn’t let apps look these two IDs up for you yet, so copy them from Google Ads”—plus direct links that open Google Ads’ overview page and its Conversions summary in a new tab, so you don’t have to go hunting for either screen.
• Placeholders describe the format instead of impersonating a real value. The Customer ID field now shows 10 digits, no hyphens and the Conversion Action ID field shows Numeric ID from the conversion action’s URL, so an empty field reads as empty.
• The setup guide opens by default while the required fields are still blank, and collapses automatically once both are filled in—no more hunting for a hidden “show instructions” toggle on a screen that already looks stuck.
• Step 2 of the guide is back. The Conversion Action ID instructions were keyed under the wrong lookup name internally, so the guide silently rendered only “Step 1: Find your Customer ID” and dropped the conversion-action instructions entirely—the exact half of the guide most merchants actually needed. That’s fixed, and both steps render now.

All of this shipped translated into all 8 of Converlay’s supported languages, with a dedicated test that renders the real copy bundle and asserts the explanation, both links, the format placeholders, and the restored second guide section—so this specific screen can’t silently regress again the way it did the first time.

Connecting Google Ads: The Full Flow

With the fix in place, setup looks like this:

1. In Converlay, open the Destinations page and select Google Ads.
2. Click Connect Google Ads and authorize with the Google account that has access to your Ads account. This is a standard OAuth sign-in—Converlay never sees or stores your Google password.
3. With the setup guide open, copy your 10-digit Customer ID from the top right of ads.google.com and paste it in without hyphens.
4. Open Goals → Conversions → Summary in Google Ads, select your Purchase conversion action, and copy the numeric ID from the ctId= parameter in the URL into the Conversion Action ID field.
5. Click Continue to turn on tracking. The guide collapses once both fields are valid.

What Happens After You Connect

Once enabled, Converlay routes Shopify purchase events to Google’s Data Manager API as conversions of the action you configured—server-side, so they aren’t affected by ad blockers, Safari’s tracking prevention, or a shopper closing the tab before a browser pixel fires. Like every ad destination in Converlay, delivery respects your store’s consent settings: purchases only route to Google Ads for visitors who consented to advertising tracking. Feeding Smart Bidding and ROAS reporting a complete, accurate purchase signal—rather than whatever a client-side tag happened to catch—is the entire point of setting this up in the first place.

Google Ads is one of 26 destinations Converlay supports out of the box, alongside Meta, TikTok, Pinterest, GA4, Klaviyo, and more—each with its own connection flow, and each documented in its own setup guide inside the app.

Get started with Converlay on the Shopify App Store →