Setting up your Google Ads channel

Once you’ve configured your Google Ads channel you can connect your advertising audiences with your Google Ads accounts.

Understanding Google Ads account structure

Before setting up your channel, it's helpful to understand how Google Ads accounts are structured:

  • Google Ads Manager account: Allows you to manage multiple ads accounts in one place

  • Google Ads Client account: Individual advertising accounts containing campaigns, budgets, and settings

With Orbit, you can either:

  • Upload audience lists to a manager account for distribution to client accounts

  • Upload audience lists directly to a specific client account for advertising

Creating your Google Ads channel

To create a new Google Ads channel:

  1. Log into Orbit as an administrator with permissions to configure the Campaigning Channel Editor.

  2. In the top right corner of your Orbit screen, click your avatar.

  3. Click Application Settings.

  4. From the left-hand menu, click Campaigning Channel Editor, then Edit.

  5. Click + Item.

  6. Select Google Ads Channel from the dropdown.

  7. Give your channel a meaningful name (e.g., Google Ads) and organise the folder structure.

  8. Click Create.

Configuring your channel settings

After creating your channel, you need to configure the basic details:

  1. Enter the Username of the user who has permission to access Google.

  2. Enter the name of the App you'll use to access Google (typically the Apteco app).

  3. Enter the Ads Account you want to access from Google.

    Note: Orbit automatically detects whether this is a manager or client account.

  4. Click + Add Variable and select the email variable from your FastStats system.

    Note: You can select a hashed email address. This supports secure data sharing from systems that store only hashed contact details.

  5. Choose whether this channel should allow Upload and Advertise or Upload only of audience lists.

    Note: This selection determines which options appear when setting up Google Ads messages in the journey builder

Configuring EU user consent settings

Google's EU User Consent Policy requires explicit consent settings for serving personalised ads.

Under the Parameters section:

  1. Set the Ad Personalisation Consent dropdown to Granted.

  2. Set the Ad User Data Consent dropdown to Granted.

Both settings are set to Unspecified by default. Setting them to Granted confirms that your custom audience lists contain recipients who have opted in to receive personalised advertising.

Note: This configuration is required if you want to serve ads with custom audience uploads. For more information about Google's consent requirements, see Google's EU User Consent Policy.

Once you’ve configured your channel, click Save All Changes.

Now that you've created your Google Ads channel, you're ready to start using it in your campaigns.

Using Google Ads in campaigns