How to track FareHarbor bookings in Google Ads and GA4

When a guest books through FareHarbor, the purchase finishes inside FareHarbor’s booking flow, not on a page of yours. Google Ads does not see it unless something carries it back. The route that works is FareHarbor into GA4, then GA4 into Google Ads. This is how it is set up on the Kauaʻi tour account I run, what it will never be able to see, and how to check that it is complete.

The setup

1. Connect FareHarbor to your GA4 property. Give FareHarbor your GA4 measurement ID (the one that starts with G-) in its Google Analytics settings, so its booking flow reports into the same property as your website. On Da Life, the GA4 tag fires on every FareHarbor booking flow.

2. Make sure the purchase carries the real value. A completed booking should arrive in GA4 as a purchase with the amount the guest paid. Group bookings and add-ons are the reason: a fixed value per booking tells Google every guest is worth the same.

3. Import that purchase into Google Ads. In Google Ads, add a conversion by importing from GA4 and choose the purchase event. Make it the primary conversion, so bidding optimises toward bookings. FareHarbor has no direct Google Ads connection, which is why the route runs through GA4.

4. Choose the settings on purpose. On Da Life the imported conversion uses the GA4 value, counts every booking, and has a 90-day click window with data-driven attribution. Those suit a tour business where people plan weeks ahead and one guest can book more than once. They are also why the Google Ads number reads higher than GA4, which is covered in the companion article.

What it will never see

Reseller bookings. Viator, GetYourGuide and other resellers send bookings into FareHarbor through their own connection. Those guests never touch your website, so GA4 never sees them and Google Ads can never count them. At Da Life that was 45% of bookings on the two main tours through Viator alone, so expect your tracked revenue to be well below your total.

Another brand on the same account. Da Life shares its FareHarbor account with a sister brand, and the GA4 tag fires on that brand’s bookings too. If that applies to you, separate the two in GA4 by item or by referring site before you judge any campaign, or one brand’s bookings will make the other’s ads look better than they are.

The check that tells you it works

1. Pick a full month. Export online revenue from FareHarbor for it, leaving reseller bookings out.
2. Pull GA4 purchase revenue for the same month.
3. If they are within a few percent, the tracking is complete. At Da Life, over the whole year, GA4 showed $408,060 against FareHarbor’s $407,706.
4. If GA4 is well short, check that the measurement ID in FareHarbor is the right one and that purchases are arriving with a value, before touching any campaign.

This is the step almost nobody does, and it is the one that matters. Every return figure you will ever read in Google Ads is built on this tracking. If the tracking only sees half the bookings, the campaign is being steered by half the picture.

On Peek, Xola or Rezdy?

The logic is the same: get the completed booking into GA4 with its real value, import it into Google Ads as the primary conversion, then check the GA4 revenue against the booking platform’s own report. The settings screens differ, and I would check each platform’s current documentation for where the GA4 ID goes rather than trusting a screenshot from last year.

Next: why Google Ads will still report more than GA4, and how the campaigns on top of this tracking are structured.