How to Link Your Google Ads Accounts to Google Analytics

Hi, and welcome back. In this video, I’ll be showing you how you can link to a Google Ads account to your Google Analytics account. I’ll also be explaining the main reasons why you want to do this as well. For those who don’t know, Google Ads is Google’s advertising platform that helps you get in front of new customers online. You’ve undoubtedly seen Google Ads before. Literally anytime you go onto Google and carry out a search, you will see tons of Google Ads at the top of the search results. We know they’re ads as it all had the little ad icon like so next to the search results. There are three main benefits of linking these two Google products together.

Number one is that it allows you to see the full customer cycle. If you was to go inside of your ads manager within your Google Ads account, it will tell you how many clicks your ad got, how many impressions your ads got, but it won’t tell you what that person done once they landed on your website. This is where Google Analytics comes into play, as if you link these two accounts together, you’ll have both those data from both different platforms all in one place, which will give you a much broader insight into the full customer cycle AKA, what that customer actually does once they land on your website.

The second benefit of linking Google Ads to Google Analytics is that you can enable a feature called auto-tagging, and what this does is automatically create a special campaign tag, and it adds it to all of your Google ad URLs, which saves you tons of manual work as you no longer have to tag all of your Google ad URLs to see where your clicks are coming from. So by linking the two accounts together, you are really saving yourself tons of work as all this stuff happens automatically in the background.

The third and final reason, which in my opinion is actually the biggest reason why you want to link these accounts is that it allows you to set up remarketing campaigns, which essentially allows you to build user audiences in Google Analytics and show targeted ads to those specific users and bring them back to your website to encourage a conversion. So now we know the three reasons why you should link these two accounts, it’s time for me to show you exactly how to do this. The first thing which you need to do is make sure you are logged into your Google Analytics account and make sure you are also logged in to your Google Ads accounts as well.

Once you’re logged into both of those accounts, what you want to do is go back into your Google Analytics account, go to admin in the bottom left-hand corner, and then you want to go to Google Ads linking under product linking in the middle. Then all you want to do is go ahead and select your Google Ads account and then click continue, and then pop in a name for that Google Ads account, which you are linking. And then under all website data, simply turn that on and enable that, and simply go ahead and click link accounts. Then click done at the bottom. And just like that, you have now connected your Google Ads account to your Google Analytics account.

Then once you’ve done this, if you would like to see your Google Ads data with in your Google Analytics account, well of course you need to go back into your Google Analytics account, and then what you want to do is go to acquisition, then go to Google Ads. And as you can see, we can now see all the data all related to Google Ads. For example, if I click into campaigns, I’ll be able to see all the Google ad campaigns, which are connected on this specific Google ad account. We can see all the campaigns that are set up.

We can even go into the keyword report and get a list of all the keywords we are bidding on, how much it’s costing us per keyword. We can also see the average cost per click. We can see the users, the sessions, the bounce rate, literally tons and tons of data all pulled from Google Ads now in our Google Analytics account. One of the other benefits I mentioned of linking these two accounts together is that it allows you to set up custom audiences that you can use for remarketing.

To set up those custom audiences, all you need to do is go back into admin and then under audience definitions if you go ahead and give that a click, you will see we have an option called audiences. This is exactly where you set up those audiences. You can see it says audience source or website data. Enable remarketing, so let’s go to the next step, which is adding a destination where we’d like to publish our audience. Just click add destination. I like to add it in my Google Ads account and I’ll also like to add it in my Google Analytics account as well.

Once you’ve gone ahead and selected those destinations, they should pop up below, and simply go ahead and click enable. And just like that, you can now see we are able to setup remarketing campaigns in Google Ads from the specific audience. What’s also good to know is that you can also create new audiences based on different variables as well. So instead of setting up a custom audience based on all of your visitors, you can set up a custom audience based on people who’ve maybe purchase your products. To do so, you want to go back to audience definitions, and then go into audiences once again. We can now see our initial audience, which we set up for all users.

So let’s go ahead and click a new audience. And this time, instead of going for all users, like we did last time, we could go for users who completed a transaction, or we could go for new users or returning users. It’s exactly the same process. Go ahead and define exactly what type of audience you would like to create a remarketing list for.

Creating custom audiences are extremely powerful as instead of showing your ads to new people who aren’t actually already familiar with your brand, you can choose to show targeted ads to people who have already been on your website, AKA people who are already familiar with your brand, and those people are the ones who are most likely to actually convert and buy your products or inquire about your services. So, now you know how to link these to Google products and setup these custom audiences, it’s over to you to take full advantage of it. I’ll see you in the next video.