Setting up a Manual ad cost data input pipeline

You can manually import cost data for each and every source/medium you have in your Google Analytics property.

To do that, create a Manual ad cost data input pipeline.

Step 1. Go to the Create pipeline screen and click Manual ad cost data input:

Step 2. Select Google Analytics access or add a new one:

Step 3. Select a Google Analytics property and data set. This data set is where the data will be imported to. If you don't have a data set in the property, create it as described here.

Note: Your Google account must have the «Edit» permission in the property you want to import data to.

Step 4-1. Select a Google Analytics view.

The currency and time zone settings of this view are needed to bring ad cost data from different services to a uniform currency and time zone in Google Analytics.

Step 4-2. Specify the date starting from which you want to have data imported. Exclude VAT if you need to have ad costs presented in Google Analytics without taxes:

How excluding VAT works:

• You can change VAT rate at any time later on by going to the Settings tab on the pipeline page.
• Some of the advertising services, when executing requests to their API, return data on costs without taxes, so the step VAT to exclude in the settings of such pipelines is absent.

Step 5. Click Create pipeline.

Note:After the pipeline is created, it takes up to 24 hours to analyze available sources in your Google Analytics property.

Step 6. Once the data is synchronized, you can manually specify cost data to export in the pipeline you've just created. To do that, open the pipeline from the pipelines list.

Step 7. Select a source/medium you need and enter the cost data in the Costs column:

Note:We highly recommend you to input costs for the previous month at the beginning of the current month. Otherwise, you can hit the Google Analytics quota:  50 upload operations per property per day.

Data will be available in Google Analytics's Cost Analysis report on the next day.

How the costs are distributed

The costs are allocated proportionally to daily visits for each source. Redistribution and updating happen daily.

What data does the Other sources pipeline uploads to GA

The pipeline uploads thee to your Google Analytics:

• source
• medium
• adCost
• date 

For each date, we upload a separate file.