Ads

The Ads page shows your Google Ads alongside the money they really brought in. Use it to see whether an ad is worth what you pay for it.

Go to Marketing → Ads. Litestore syncs your ads from Google Ads, which is the only ad platform it can connect to.

Each synced ad comes with the platform's own impressions, clicks, conversions and spend. Litestore calculates your real revenue from that ad separately, from the orders credited to it.

Keeping these two apart is the main idea of the page. Google Ads reports what it thinks it achieved. Your database knows which orders were paid and not refunded. You see both numbers, and neither one overwrites the other.

After every sync, Litestore recalculates each campaign's ad spend from its ads.

Google Ads is the only sync

Connect Google Ads under Settings → Integrations. You need these values:

customer ID
developer token
OAuth client ID
OAuth client secret
refresh token

Some records show Meta Ads or TikTok Ads as their platform, but Litestore can't fetch anything from them. If you ask Litestore to sync any platform other than Google Ads, it refuses straight away instead of silently doing nothing.

Ads arrive by sync, not by hand

You can't create an ad in Litestore. There's no form for it.

Once an ad has synced, you can change its status, link it to one of your campaigns and read its numbers.

The status is one of these:

active
paused
completed
archived

What Google Ads controls

Every sync overwrites these fields with the values from Google Ads:

• Name
• External campaign name
• Destination URL
• Headline
• Description
• Status
• Impressions
• Clicks
• Conversions
• Spend

Google Ads owns all ten. After a sync, they show exactly what Google Ads reported.

Rates are calculated, never stored

Litestore works out four rates from the raw counters each time it shows them:

• Click-through rate
• Cost per thousand impressions
• Cost per click
• Cost per acquisition

Because Litestore calculates them on the spot, they always match the counters they come from.

Your revenue is not the platform's conversion count

Litestore calculates revenue and conversions per ad each time you open the page. It uses the orders credited to that ad, converts them into your base currency and subtracts refunds.

Next to that, Litestore keeps the conversion figure that Google Ads reported, unchanged.

The two numbers often differ. Litestore shows you the gap instead of hiding it.

Matching a landing URL to a product

During a sync, Litestore reads the ad's destination URL and tries to find the product it leads to. It tries these in order:

1. Your canonical product path
2. The Shopify-style path
3. A collection path
4. A short path
5. A ?product= parameter
6. An item path
7. An external link whose address matches

Campaign ad spend is corrected after each sync

After each sync, Litestore recalculates every campaign's ad spend from the ads currently linked to it. It adds the difference to the campaign's total spend.

Litestore doesn't keep a running total. When Google Ads corrects or restates its figures, the campaign's return on ad spend follows instead of drifting away.

An ad can't go live without something to sell

Litestore refuses to activate an ad in these cases:

• The ad has no linked product
• The linked product isn't published
• The linked product is out of stock

This stops you from paying for visitors who arrive at something they can't buy.

Choosing what to do with an ad

If an ad shows spend but none of your own revenue, fix its landing URL first. Spend always syncs, but Litestore can only credit orders through the reference in the URL.

Link the ad to a campaign when you want its cost counted in that campaign's spend and return on ad spend. You have to set this link yourself, because Google Ads doesn't know about your campaigns.

When your revenue figure and Google's conversion count disagree, trust your own. Yours subtracts refunds and is in your base currency. Google's does neither.

For any ad on this page, ask yourself one question:

Is this ad's cost counted in the right campaign, and can Litestore trace an order from it back here?

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