If you are running advertising through DoubleClick, you will want to deploy Floodlight tags on your website to record key conversions and sales — data that will help you or your agency optimize your paid campaigns. Google Tag Manager provides the most efficient and reliable means of managing DoubleClick Floodlight tags on your site.

With GTM installed, you are only a few steps away from getting your Floodlight tags up and running. We will outline the process in the rest of this article.

Google released the new global site tag (gtag.js) implementation for DoubleClick tags in response to recent changes across the web that affect conversion measurement. As a result, the code for a Floodlight tag looks different than it did before.

DoubleClick now provides you with a global snippet to be placed on all pages of your site, along with event snippets for each conversion activity.

The global site tag looks like this:

<!-- 
Start of global snippet: Please do not remove
Place this snippet between the <head> and </head> tags on every page of your site.
-->
<!-- Global site tag (gtag.js) - DoubleClick -->
<script async src="https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=DC-[floodlightConfigID]"></script>
<script>
 window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || [];
 function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);}
 gtag('js', new Date());

gtag('config', 'DC-[floodlightConfigID]');
</script>
<!-- End of global snippet: Please do not remove -->

And each event snippet will look like this:

<!-- 
Event snippet for Activity Name on http://foo.com: Please do not remove.
Place this snippet on pages with events you’re tracking.
Creation date: 10/30/2017
-->
<script>
  gtag('event', 'conversion', {
    'allow_custom_scripts': true,
    'u1': '[variable]',
    'send_to': 'DC-[floodlightConfigID]/[activityGroupTagString]/[activityTagString]+[countingMethod]'
  });
</script>
<noscript>
<img src="https://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/activity/src=[floodlightConfigID];type=[activityGroupTagString];cat=[activityTagString];dc_lat=;dc_rdid=;tag_for_child_directed_treatment=;ord=1?" width="1" height="1" alt=""/>
</noscript>
<!-- End of event snippet: Please do not remove -->

While you could deploy these scripts using custom HTML tags in GTM, it will be more efficient and easier to manage your implementation by using the DoubleClick tag templates.

Configuring Floodlight Tags in GTM

  1. Add a Conversion Linker tag:
    1. Create a new tag > Select Conversion Linker > Fire on All Pages
  2. Add a DoubleClick Floodlight tag for each event snippet:
    1. Create a new tag > Select DoubleClick Floodlight Counter or DoubleClick Floodlight Sales
      • If your event snippet includes parameters for Order ID and Revenue, choose the “Sales” tag. Otherwise, choose the Counter.
    2. Enter the Advertiser ID, Group Tag, and Activity Tag, and Counting Method values from your event snippet:
      • In each event snippet, these values are available in the “send_to” parameter, for example:
        Floodlight event snippet with configuration parameters highlighted
      • Enter these values into the respective fields in the tag template:
        DoubleClick Floodlight tag in GTM configured with sample values.
    3. Configure each Floodlight tag with an appropriate trigger. For example, if your conversion activity is a form submission, an appropriate trigger may be the “thank you” page of the form.

Note that you do not need to create a separate tag in GTM for the global snippet provided by DoubleClick. The Conversion Linker tag will provide the needed functionality of the global tag.