How Do You Import Goals & Conversions From Google Analytics To Google Ads?

If you are running a Google Ads account and you have an ecommerce website, you will need to measure how well your ad spend is doing for you. Take a look at this simple guide to help you import goals and conversions from Google Analytics into Google Ads.

In order to bring conversion events from Google Analytics into Google Ads, you are going to have to convert any events you want to track into ‘Goals’ first within Google Analytics and we wrote another article with the ‘how to’ for this here.

You will also have to set up ecommerce conversion tracking within Google Analytics if you sell items online too, which will need the help of your website developer in order to fire back the correct data into Google Analytics so that you can track revenue.

This kind of tracking is achieved in different ways depending on whether your website is built with common technologies like WordPress or Shopify, or if it’s bespoke system is written in a language like asp or php. Ask your web designer!

How do you add goals and conversions from Google Analytics to Google Ads?

First you will need to have linked your Google Ads and Google Analytics accounts together – see this how to guide here. You should also have some goals to import from Google Analytics, so if you don’t have these set up, then see how to create goals in Analytics here.

Once these things are done, here is what you need to do in Google Ads:

• On the top navigation bar, click “Tools & Settings” and then “Conversions”
• Any goals you might already have set up will be listed here already. You will also find conversions that have been put there by Google Ads as part of setting up your account. For instance if you set up a Calls Only ad or extension, then calls will be a conversion inserted into this list by Google Ads automatically.
• To add new goals from Google Analytics as conversion events in Google Ads, click the ‘Plus’ button and then select “Import”
• Select Google Analytics (UA is the most likely option, so choose this unless you know you have Google Analytics 4 set up and need to import goals from there instead).
• Click “Continue” and you will see all the Goals and Ecommerce conversions in a list. Select the ones you want to use in order to train your Google Ads to understand as ‘a good outcome’ for the Google Ads money you spend. Most people with ecommerce websites only want to track actual sales for instance, but if you are a b2b business, you might want to track clicks on email addresses or submissions of sales leads forms.
• Click “Import & Continue” and then “Done”.

What happens next?

That’s pretty much it! Once data starts firing in Analytics, it will be automatically updated in Google Ads and will show under the ‘Conversions’ column in your main campaign monitoring report screen.

Before you leave the Conversions section of Google Ads though, take a quick scan through the list of conversions in your account. There is a column entitled “Include in Conversions”. You might not want all of these set to ‘yes’ if some of the conversions are not exactly what you might define as ‘success’. So for instance if you have one called ‘android installs’ or another called ‘clicked more than 3 pages on the website’, you might not consider these important enough to include as a ‘conversion’ for the purposes of training the Ads account.

Anything that is set to ‘yes’ will be a part of training the account to do ‘more of that’, and so click through on any in the list you don’t want and select ‘no’ to remove from your main reporting. The numbers will still be collected in the Conversions page on Google Ads, but the account will no longer be trained by this data.

Read more

We hope that this series of articles will save you hours of searching for how to deal with small tasks.  Take a look at the other articles we’ve put together:

• How do you change the default currency in Google Analytics to GBP?
• How do you link your Google Ads and Google Analytics accounts together?
• How do you link your Google Analytics account to Google Ads?
• How to use events as conversion goals in Google Ads

As we work our way through small and always difficult to remember tasks at the coalface of marketing, we’re sure there will be additions to this list very soon, so maybe bookmark this page if you found it helpful.

Contact us

We’re Google Partners, so if you’d like help with Google Analytics, Google Ads, marketing data analysis or digital marketing strategy, please email us on info@destination-digital.co.uk or give us a call on 01629 810199.