How To Link Your Google Analytics To Google Ads

It’s a smart idea to link your Google Analytics account to your Google Ads account to share data. Once linked up, the two accounts can share information which helps you to monitor your Google Ads spend.  It’s a step that’s buried in the Google Ads interface though and so we’ve put together this simple guide to help you link up with ease.

To complement our guide to help you pull your Google Ads data into your Google Analytics account, we’ve also put together this guide to reciprocate the linking.

Whereas pulling your data into Google Analytics is just a neat way of seeing your Ads performance data in the same place you look at your web traffic data, linking your Google Analytics account with Google Ads enables you to then go on to import ecommerce info and goals as conversions from Google Analytics. This helps you train your Google Ads account to do more of what you want it to do.

Why do I need to link Google Ads with Google Analytics?

A handy way of training your Google Ads account to do what you want it to do is to import “Goals” and ecommerce tracking data that has already been set up in Google Analytics. This is in order to bring them in as conversion events into Google Ads, without necessarily needing to set up separate conversion tracking from Google Ads in your website’s code.

Most ecommerce website owners will mainly be concerned with getting sales out of their Google Ads spend, and so it will follow that they will normally have ecommerce tracking set up via Google Analytics already, long before they think about Google Ads campaigns. This makes it a quick and speedy way to associate your Google Ads account with your Google Analytics account and pull this data through, with no coding required!

How do you link your Google Analytics account with Google Ads?

Here’s how (two ways!).

The first way:

1. “Linked Accounts” can be accessed via the “Tools & Settings” drop down in the top navigation bar and is found in the “Setup” column. Click this.
2. In the list of options, choose Google Analytics (UA) – unless you have a Google Analytics 4 account to import from instead. Click ‘Details’.
3. You will then be presented with a list of Google Analytics accounts that your Google Ads login has access to.
4. Click “Link” next to the one that matches your website tracking in Google Analytics (cross check with the ID underneath the name of the property).

The second way is as follows:

1. In Google Ads, click on “Tools & Settings”, and then under the “Measurement list”, click “Conversions”.
2. Click the Plus sign then “Import”, and then choose Google Analytics (UA) – unless you have a Google Analytics 4 account to import from instead. Click “Continue”.
3. On the next screen, if you have already associated your Google Analytics account, it will list it here. Or you will be prompted to click through to look at your “Linked Accounts” in order to link them so that you can import the goals from the Analytics account.

What happens next?

If you already had a Google Analytics account under the same Admin level login as your Google Ads account, then you are done. You can now go ahead and import your goals or ecommerce tracking from Google Analytics to start training your Google Ads account.

If this is your first time setting up Google Ads for your business, then you might also want to linking Google Ads within Google Analytics too, so click through and read that article.

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 import conversions from Google Analytics 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.