Introduction
With Sonar Optimize, Triple Whale integrates directly with Google Ads to automatically send enriched, first-party data to Google Ads as conversion actions. Connect Sonar Optimize to your Google Ads account and achieve a complete picture of the customers, interactions, and web conversions of your website. Follow this guide to track relevant conversions from your store and optimize your Google Ads campaigns based on real-time data.
Once Enabled, Sonar Optimize will:
Ensure that every conversion is captured by Google
Enrich more conversions with first-party data, enabling Google to better target relevant customers
Sonar Optimize for Headless Shopify stores, BigCommerce stores, and WooCommerce stores
Please note that Headless Shopify stores as well as stores built on BigCommerce or WooCommerce will require developer implementation in order to enable Sonar Optimize. See the relevant documentation:
Configuring Sonar Optimize
Head to Sonar settings > Google Ads. Click Save and Continue to begin the self-setup.
1. Get Started
Begin your Sonar Optimize setup by enabling the following two Pixel components:
Theme App Embed
Web Pixel Extension
If you have an alternative Pixel installation (such as Headless), select that option to skip this step.
2. Connect Dataset
Select the Google Ads Account you’d like to connect to receive Sonar Optimize enrichment.
If you are not seeing your account , you may need to disconnect and reconnect your Google Ads account in order to grant the additional permissions needed for Sonar Optimize.
3. Enable Enhanced Conversions for Leads
To send enriched conversions to Google, you must first enable Enhanced Conversions for Leads on your Google Ads account.
First, open your Google Ads account and head to Goals > Conversions > Settings
Open Customer data terms. Review the policy and accept the terms. Click Save.
Can't Access the Customer Data Terms?
If you cannot view the customer data terms, your ad account's conversions are managed by a Manager account. You will need to accept the terms from within the Manager account.
Next, open the Enhanced Conversions for Leads section. Check the box to "Turn on enhanced conversions for leads". For Method, select Google tag. Click Save.
You have now enabled enhanced conversions for leads. Return to Triple Whale to continue configuring Sonar Optimize.
4. Send Events for Enrichment
Select which events you want to send to Google Ads. For optimal results, it is recommended you send every event back to Google Ads. By default, Triple Whale will send all events.
These are the events you can send to Google Ads:
Page View
Add to Cart
Initiate Checkout
Purchase
New Customer Purchase
Return Customer Purchase
Attribution Passback (Triple Attribution)
Triple Whale Attribution Passback TA (enabled)
Attribution Passback (First Click)
Attribution Passback (Last Click)
Attribution Passback (Linear Paid)
Attribution Passback (Linear All)
We recommend creating a new Conversion Action for every event you wish to sync from Triple Whale to Google Ads.
Begin with Secondary Actions
Important: Always configure Sonar actions as Secondary actions first to collect sufficient data to inform your decision about transitioning to Primary Actions.
While Sonar Optimize events must be set as Primary for account-wide ad bidding optimization, premature implementation can significantly disrupt your automatic bidding performance and campaign effectiveness.
Recommended Approach:
Set up all new Sonar actions as Secondary
Allow data collection for an adequate period (recommended: 2× your typical Google conversion window — e.g., ~30 days if most conversions occur within 14 days)
Why This Matters:
When you designate any Sonar Conversion Action as Primary, all active campaigns optimizing for the associated Goal category will immediately modify their bidding strategies to prioritize this new action. Without sufficient historical data, this can lead to:
Unpredictable campaign performance
Inefficient budget allocation
Potential loss of conversion opportunities
Compromised machine learning effectiveness
By allowing these actions to accumulate meaningful data before promotion to Primary status, you ensure Google's algorithms have robust information to properly optimize your advertising investments.
When you're confident you've gathered adequate data to effectively optimize against your Sonar conversions, proceed to the "Transitioning your Campaigns to Optimize for Sonar Conversion" section below.
For more about optimization settings in Google, see Google’s support article.
5. Exclude Events For Enrichment
By default, any purchase event sent to Meta will be used to measure and optimize your campaigns. To avoid sending purchase events unrelated to your Meta campaigns, you can exclude them by order tag or Shopify sales channel.
If your shop offers subscription orders, you can map first subscription orders and recurring subscription orders back to Meta. By doing so, recurring subscription purchases will be excluded from being sent to Meta.
Triple Whale excludes certain Sales Channels from the conversion events that it transmits (draft orders, PoS orders, returns, meta shop orders, and shop app orders). You can also choose to exclude certain conversion events from being sent to Meta based on order tags and/or sales channel.
To exclude a custom Sales channel, you must provide the channel name and the channel code. If you aren't sure about your channel code, refer to our article: Shopify Sales Channel Names and Codes, or reach out to Triple Whale support.
6. Validate Setup
Once you are satisfied with the configuration settings, click Save Configuration. Although we will automatically monitor and validate setup for you, you can manually validate the setup in two ways:
Confirm Sonar Optimize is sending events: View your Google Ads Delivery Overview to see if the total events sent column is being populated. You may need to wait 24 hours or more to see if events are being sent.
Confirm Google Ads is receiving events: Go to your Google Ads Manager and confirm that you are receiving server events for your connected dataset.
Navigate to your Conversions summary page and locate the Conversion Actions mapped to your Sonar Events. Ensure that the Status is showing Active. Validate that the event is receiving conversion data by looking at the All Conversions column.
Monitor your Action Status
In Google, ensure that the status remains Active and that no Sonar conversion actions display Needs Attention. If you see a Needs Attention warning, review the Google Troubleshooting Steps in the Actions column.
Delivery Overview
Once Sonar Optimize is enabled for Google Ads, you can easily monitor the data transmission via Google Ads' CAPI within Triple Whale. In Sonar Settings, click View Details to access the Delivery Overview page. Here, you will see a data table that displays the total number of enriched events, broken out by event type over the chosen time frame. This tells you what data Triple Whale is broadcasting to Google Ads.
Transitioning your Campaigns to Optimize for Sonar Conversions
Once you have collected enough conversion data through Sonar (recommended 30-45 days, or twice the conversion window of the majority of your Google conversions), transitioning to Sonar conversions for your campaigns should be gradual.
Phase 1: Testing Sonar with Campaign Specific Conversion Goals (Recommended)
To begin to test your Sonar conversions without converting them to primary conversion actions for your entire account, we recommend you start by testing your Sonar conversion actions with a single campaign.
To do this, you can leverage Campaign-Specific Conversion Goals.
Create A Custom Goal
Go to Goals > Summary > Custom Goals (at the bottom of the page)
Click Add Custom Goal
Name your goal and select the relevant Sonar conversion you wish to test
Apply your Custom Goal to a Campaign
In your Google Ads account, click the Campaigns icon
Click the Campaigns drop down.
Click Campaigns, and select the campaign that you want to add conversion goals to.
Click the Settings tab.
Click the Goals drop down in the settings menu.
Click Use Campaign-specific goal settings.
Select the conversion goals you want.
Click Save.
Excerpt from Google KB:
Using the conversions setting with Smart Bidding
Smart Bidding (including target CPA and Target ROAS bidding strategies), considers only conversions reported in the "Conversions" column when optimizing towards your target. Google's AI bidding models take time to adapt to any changes you make to your conversion configuration. This is true both at the account level and at the campaign level. If you decide to change your conversion goals at the campaign-level using the Conversions setting (Search) or the Conversion goals setting (Shopping), you should update your targets gradually over time as the bidding models adjust to newly reported conversions data. Otherwise, you may have unwanted fluctuations in spend. Note that Smart campaigns only optimize for a smaller set of goals.
Testing your Sonar Conversions
Once you have configured a campaign-specific goal, you can set the campaign live to monitor the results. You may want to experiment with multiple campaigns or different campaign types to ensure consistent results before migrating to Sonar across your account.
Migrating to Sonar for All Campaigns
Once you have tested Sonar using campaign-specific goals, it is time to migrate your account goals to Sonar.
To allow Google to use the new conversion actions you created for your Sonar events for bidding optimization, you will need to update their optimization settings to make them Primary actions within your main account Goals.
Navigate to Goals > Conversions > Summary in your Google Ads account
For each Sonar conversion action you created: locate it in the table and click on the Conversion Action name to go to the edit screen for the conversion action.
Click Edit and Select “Primary action used for bidding optimization” in the Action Optimization menu. Click Save.
Disable Existing Primary Action
Typically, you should only have one Primary Action configured for each Goal category in your Google Ads account. To ensure that you don’t optimize for duplicate conversions, it is important to disable your existing Primary Action.
When completed, your Sonar action should be labeled as Primary and any other actions as Secondary.
Once you have made this change, the campaigns in your account configured for this Goal category will automatically switch to using Sonar as the main conversion source!