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Advertising

A merchant connects their ad account, builds and runs campaigns from inside their store, and sees performance measured against their orders and gross profit rather than clicks. Galactic Core holds the catalog, the costs, and every sale — online and in-store — so ad spend can be joined to the margin it actually produced.
Advertising is a platform-managed provider. Unlike the Extensions provider interfaces you implement yourself, the ad platforms are built and operated by Galactic Core — a merchant connects an account and uses the built-in tools rather than writing an integration. Google Ads and Meta Ads (Facebook & Instagram) are available, both on the same interface.

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Return on ad spend, on real profit

Gross-profit ROAS

Ad spend is joined to orders and cost of goods, reporting profit earned per dollar spent rather than revenue. It is the signal the automatic decisions below act on.

Online + in-store conversions

Because Galactic Core is the sales system for both the storefront and the point of sale, a campaign can get credit for the in-store purchases it drove — a purchase online and at the counter are both conversions.

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What a merchant can do

AI campaign builder

Describe what to advertise and pick a goal; the builder generates a complete campaign — structure, budget guidance, ad groups, and A/B ad-copy variants — written to pass advertising policy, ready to review before anything goes live.

Marketing goals

Everything aligns to a goal the merchant sets — maximize profit, acquire new customers, sell aging inventory, run a seasonal push, or grow revenue — and the campaigns, rules, and budgets optimize toward it.

Automatic rules

Ready-made rules with no setup: pause ads for out-of-stock products, raise budgets when return on ad spend beats a target, pause a campaign when a product’s margin drops, auto-add wasteful search terms as negative keywords, keep shopping coverage, and email a daily performance digest.

Custom automation (AI)

Need something the ready-made rules don’t cover? Describe it in plain language — “boost my best-converting in-stock SKUs and pause anything under 15% margin” — and the AI Builder creates a custom automation that reads the store’s live data and manages the ads on its own, within the same safety controls.

Advertise your promotions

Run a promotion and Galactic Core can advertise it for you — the ad copy features the real discount with an honest time-bound call to action, and the campaign is timed to the promotion’s window (launched when it goes live, paused when it ends), so the offer and the ad stay in sync.

Autonomous Marketing

Set a monthly budget cap, a goal, and hard constraints — never advertise below a margin, pause when stock is low, cap daily budget changes, require approval above a threshold — and Galactic Core runs the advertising within those limits, holding anything above the approval line for sign-off.

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Policy screening

Advertising decisions affect a store’s standing with the ad platform, so every ad is screened against advertising policy before it goes live, watched for policy problems afterward, and a store’s ad changes are paused automatically if problems accumulate. The screening runs in the background; a paused store is re-enabled with support. The limits on what advertising automation may do on its own are in Guardrails.

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For developers building a storefront

You don’t call an advertising API from a storefront — campaigns and automation are merchant tools in the admin. There is one thing a storefront does to make advertising work: forward the ad click id and the shopper’s privacy consent when placing an order, so a purchase can be reported back as a conversion. On a paid order, pass these optional fields to orders.createOrder:
When a gclid is missing — a shopper switched devices, cleared cookies, or the click id expired — Galactic Core matches the sale to the ad account using the order’s customer email and phone, hashed on our servers. The fields above remain the whole client-side contract; this fallback is server-side.
Consent is required by law for EEA, UK, and Swiss shoppers. A storefront serving those regions needs a compliant consent banner (accept / reject, editable later), and the values it forwards must be the shopper’s real choice — unspecified where they have not yet chosen. Galactic Core decides what to report from those values and withholds a conversion where the shopper’s region and consent do not allow it, so a guessed value produces a wrong reporting decision rather than a rejected request.
Storefronts Anvil builds wire this consent banner and the createOrder fields automatically. If you build your own storefront and the merchant runs advertising, implement the same contract.
Conversions are reported server-side: Galactic Core sends each one to the ad platform directly from its own servers, keyed by the gclid forwarded on the order. Forwarding gclid on createOrder is the entire client-side contract, so a storefront needs:
  • No Google Analytics (GA4) property — the merchant doesn’t need a GA4 account at all for conversions to report.
  • No global site tag (gtag) or tag manager on the storefront, and no third-party analytics script.
  • No GA4 ↔ Google Ads linking — the conversion goes straight to the ad account.
A storefront therefore carries no third-party advertising script, consistent with Galactic Core’s built-in analytics.

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Availability

Advertising is connected in the admin under Integrations — Google Ads and Meta Ads (Facebook & Instagram). Connecting Meta takes a single approval: Galactic Core discovers the merchant’s ad account and sets up conversion tracking automatically, with no IDs to copy. Some capabilities depend on the ad platform approving the account for API access; until then the connection reports its status clearly rather than failing silently.