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Floodlight tags explained (Campaign Manager 360, DV360)

NyXi

NyXi

7 min read

Floodlight is Google's conversion tracking for Campaign Manager 360 and Display & Video 360. What Counter and Sales tags do, what the advertiser ID and the cat and type strings mean.

If Tag Explorer has found something labelled Floodlight on your site, it means your advertising is being measured through Google’s enterprise stack rather than a standard Google Ads account. Floodlight is the conversion tracking system behind Campaign Manager 360 and Display & Video 360, and it also feeds Search Ads 360. Paste your page into Tag Explorer to see this tag on your own site.

In plain terms, it is the part that notices when someone who saw or clicked an ad later does something valuable on your site, and reports that back to the platform the ads were bought in. It is one shared measurement layer used across several buying tools, which is exactly why large advertisers use it.

What it actually does

A Floodlight tag sits on a page that only matters to people who have finished something: a thank you page, an order confirmation, a download screen. When that page loads, the tag reports the event back to Google’s ad servers.

On its own that is just a count. The value comes from the matching step. If the visitor arrived from an ad, information about that click was already stored, so the platform can join the conversion to the campaign, the placement and the creative that earned it. That join is what turns a number into a spending decision.

Because Floodlight is shared, one set of tags serves several platforms at once. An agency running display through Display & Video 360 and reporting through Campaign Manager 360 does not install two measurement systems, it installs one. Google’s Floodlight overview is the reference if you need to hand something to a developer.

What the ID means

Floodlight does not use a single friendly tracking code the way GA4 uses G-XXXXXXXXXX. It uses three values together, and you will see them named in the tag configuration or in the raw tag itself:

  • Advertiser ID, a plain number, usually written as src=1234567. This identifies your advertiser account inside Campaign Manager 360. Everything else hangs off it.
  • Activity group tag string, written as cat=, which names the family the conversion belongs to, such as enquiries or purchases.
  • Activity tag string, written as type=, which names the specific action being measured.

So a single Floodlight tag is really an advertiser plus a group plus an activity. Two tags on one site normally share the src value and differ in cat and type. If you see two different advertiser IDs, two different accounts are measuring the same site, which is worth a question rather than an assumption.

You will also meet two other parameters in the wild. ord= is the ordinal, a value Floodlight uses to control repeat counting, and u1 through to a long list of numbered slots are custom variables, used to carry things like an order value or a product category into reporting.

Counter tags and Sales tags

There are two kinds, and picking the wrong one is a common inherited mistake.

A Counter tag counts how many times something happened. Enquiry forms, newsletter signups, brochure downloads, appointment bookings. Its counting method decides whether every single fire counts or whether one visitor can only count once per session or per day.

A Sales tag records a transaction, and carries revenue and quantity with it. It belongs on the order confirmation page and nowhere else. Google’s Floodlight Sales tag documentation covers the fields Tag Manager expects.

The practical rule: if the thing being measured has a monetary value attached, it is a Sales tag. If it is simply an action, it is a Counter tag. A Sales tag with no revenue passed into it reports every order as worth zero, which quietly makes your best campaigns look worthless.

What it gets confused with

Floodlight and Google Ads conversion tracking look similar on a page and do a similar job, but they are separate systems with separate IDs feeding separate platforms.

A Google Ads conversion tag uses an AW-XXXXXXXXX conversion ID and reports into a standard Google Ads account. Floodlight uses a numeric advertiser ID and reports into Campaign Manager 360. Having both is normal for an advertiser buying through both routes, and it is not a duplicate: the same conversion is deliberately reported to two platforms. Expect the two to disagree slightly on totals, because their attribution rules differ.

Both of them depend on the Conversion Linker. It stores ad click information in a first-party cookie on your own domain, which matters more every year as browsers keep restricting third-party cookies. That is the direction of travel, and it is why the Linker has quietly become the most important tag in an advertising setup.

What this looks like in Tag Explorer

Tag Explorer draws your page as a tree. Each Tag Manager container is a branch, the tags in it are leaves underneath, and anything hard coded into the page HTML sits under DIRECT ON PAGE. Floodlight tags appear as Advertising cards.

Where the container exposes a readable identifier, it becomes the card title and the tag type is the subtitle. Where it does not, the card shows the type as the title with no copy button, which is the same normal behaviour you see on a Conversion Linker or a GA4 event tag. It means there is no single public ID to copy, not that something is wrong.

Each card has an info icon that opens a short definition and the Learn more link that brought you here. If the same identifier turns up from two sources, the tool shows a duplicate banner and tints the affected cards red with an attention badge. The insights panel below the tree raises softer advisories, including odd containers: a container holding a single tag with no matching <noscript> block is often an agency container nobody finished.

Two limits matter here more than on most tags. The public container file never contains the human names you gave your tags, so a scan cannot tell you which Floodlight activity a card represents. And the tool reads the published container only, so a new Floodlight tag sitting in an unsubmitted workspace will not appear. The scan proves a tag is installed, not that it fired, which for a conversion tag on a thank you page is the whole question. Preview mode in Tag Manager and the browser DevTools Network tab are what prove firing.

What to do if it is missing, duplicated or dead

Missing. If your media team reports conversions from Campaign Manager 360 but no Floodlight card appears on your confirmation page, the tag is not live. Check it exists in the container, that its trigger really matches the confirmation URL, and that the container version was published. Scan the actual confirmation page rather than the homepage: Floodlight belongs on pages a scan of the front page will never see.

Duplicated. The same activity firing from two places counts every conversion twice. This usually happens when a tag is hard coded into the confirmation page template and also added to Tag Manager during a later migration. Keep the container copy and remove the hard-coded one, since that is the copy nobody remembers editing. A Counter tag and a Sales tag on the same page are not a duplicate: they measure different things.

Dead or stale. Floodlight itself is current, so a tag is not dead by age. What does go stale is an advertiser ID belonging to an agency you no longer work with, still collecting conversions into a platform you cannot log into. If nobody can name the account behind the number, treat it as a leftover: get it confirmed, then remove it. A live tag reporting into an account you do not control is worse than no tag, because it reads as measurement while informing nobody.

If you want to know exactly which advertising tags are live on your confirmation page, run that page through Tag Explorer rather than your homepage. If the results include accounts nobody on your side can name, that is worth resolving before you spend anything further, and it is the sort of groundwork our ChatGPT Ads work starts with, because a campaign is only as honest as the conversion tracking under it.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between a Floodlight Counter tag and a Sales tag?

A Counter tag counts how many times an action happened, such as a form submission or a page reaching a thank you screen. A Sales tag records a transaction, carrying the revenue and the number of items with it. Most sites need Counter tags for enquiries and a single Sales tag on the order confirmation page.

Do I need Floodlight if I only run Google Ads search campaigns?

No. Floodlight belongs to Campaign Manager 360 and Display & Video 360, which are the enterprise and programmatic side of Google's advertising stack. If your buying happens entirely in a standard Google Ads account, ordinary Google Ads conversion tags do the job and Floodlight adds nothing.

Why does a Floodlight tag show no ID in a scan?

Floodlight tags carry their identifiers as configuration inside the tag rather than as a single public tracking code, and a published container does not always expose them in a readable form. When there is no ID to show, a scan lists the tag type instead and offers no copy button. That is normal and not a fault.

Does Floodlight need the Conversion Linker?

Yes, in practice. The Conversion Linker stores ad click information in a first-party cookie on your own domain so that a conversion recorded later can be matched back to the click. Without it, Floodlight still fires but attribution degrades, and the campaigns that earned the conversion stop getting credit for it.

Can one Floodlight tag firing twice inflate my numbers?

Yes. A Counter tag that fires on both a thank you page load and a form submission event records the same conversion twice, which inflates reported volume and makes cost per conversion look better than it is. Floodlight has counting methods that limit repeats, but they cannot undo two genuinely separate fires on one page.

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