Google Analytics for Reporting linking Google Ads to Analytics

Google Analytics for Reporting linking Google Ads to Analytics

#4 in the series

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Google Ads Reporting

Google Ads had a wide assortment of reports available to help you assess the value and performance of your marketing investment.  This includes reports to help you determine which ad groups, which keywords, which ads, and more, are performing best.  You can even get a geographic breakdown of which countries, or provinces, or states are driving the results you seek.  This is all very valuable information and helps you to make decisions on how to allocate your Google Ads budget spending.

Not all of your digital marketing activities can be captured within your Google Ads reporting which where the data available begins to fall short.

Digital Marketing Program Level Reporting

In order to make a truly informed marketing decision, a marketing manager should be able to view their data within the context of your digital marketing plan, not just your Google Ads spend.  This includes many other potential digital platforms including social media activities, referral traffic, organic traffic especially as a result of your content marketing or SEO efforts, email marketing campaigns, video marketing, and more.  Much of this can be tracked and attributed back to the traffic source if properly set up in Google Analytics.  This then means we can use Google Analytics to provide us with performance data across our digital marketing plans, not just the data we are limited to within Google Ads reporting.

Linking Google Ads to Google Analytics

So we must link our Google Ads account to our Google Analytics account. An important note is that when linking these accounts, you will need to be logged into a Google account that had administrative level access to both accounts.

To link your accounts:

  1. Log into your Google Analytics account. 
  2. Click the Admin gear icon in the lower corner.
  3. In the Property column, click Google Ads Linking
  4. When you click the link above, you will be displayed a list of Google Ads account that you have Admin access to with your Google account. 
  5. Choose the correct account.

Google Ads Data in Google Analytics

The process above allows Google Ads and Google Analytics to share data.  This places the Google Analytics source data along side your other source data such google organic traffic, Facebook social traffic, direct traffic, referral traffic, etc.  When viewing the #1 most important report in Google Analytics, you will be able to directly compare these traffic sources and quality of the traffic they are bringing to your site.  In addition to viewing important data such as number of visitors, the most important report in all of Google Analytics also includes behavioural data on each traffic source such as the average session duration, time on site, and average number of pages viewed.  The report can be found in Google Analytics by clicking Acquisition – All Traffic – Source/Medium.  As an even more valuable comparison is possible if you have set up Conversion Goals in Google Analytics.  If so then you can now attribute your most valuable activities on your website to the sources of traffic.

Our next article in this series will outline how you can send Google Ads conversion tracking data to Google Analytics and have it track to a Conversion Goal.