I have a desktop app for Windows. it's written in C++. We're promoting the software using Google Adwords.

We would like to count installations of the software as a conversion on Google Ads, so the algorithm can optimize for it. But all I can find is for Mobile Apps, hooking up with Firebase or Google Analytics, but in the set up it's asking for App ID's on Google Play or Apple's AppStore which doesn't fit my case.

Has anyone done this before? or could some point in the right direction?

I haven't tried the standard pixel approach, because cookies are in the browser that generates the download, but not in the installed software itself, so there is no way for attribution to work correctly