How to Connect Google Analytics to Google Ads
Advertising reporting stops at your front door. Analytics covers everything past it. A business running both needs to see them together, because paid and organic frequently compete for the same searches and separate reporting hides that entirely.
Seeing Both In One Place
We do not sell paid advertising, so nothing on this page recommends whether you should run any. What it covers is measurement: if you are already spending money on advertisements, joining that reporting to your analytics tells you what the spending produced once people arrived.
What advertising reporting knows. Up to the click.
Impressions, clicks, cost and whichever outcomes were configured within that system. It is thorough about the advertisement and blind to the website.
What analytics knows. Everything after.
Which pages those people saw, how they behaved and whether they did anything useful. It is thorough about the website and knows little about what was paid to get them there.
Why separate reporting misleads. Each looks complete.
Both produce confident numbers about the same visitors. Read apart, they support two different stories. The business ends up choosing whichever one it prefers.
What the connection is. A permission, not a change.
Two accounts you own being allowed to see something of each other. Nothing on the website alters and nothing about your advertising changes.
Why we are covering it at all. The measurement is ours.
Plenty of our clients run advertising through somebody else while we look after the site and the search work. Being able to read both sets of figures matters to that arrangement, whoever is spending the money.
Who this page is for. Businesses already advertising.
If you have no advertising account, there is nothing here to do and the rest of this cluster is more useful to you.
What The Connection Enables
Three things become possible once the two are joined. Only the first is what most people expect. The other two are why it is worth doing rather than merely tidy.
Advertising data inside analytics. The obvious one.
Cost and click information appearing alongside behaviour, so paid visitors can be examined the same way as any other source rather than in a separate system.
Behaviour comparison across sources. The useful one.
Whether people arriving from advertisements behave like people arriving from search. If paid visitors leave immediately while organic visitors enquire, that is a finding neither system produces alone.
Analytics outcomes available to the advertising side. The efficient one.
Results you defined once in analytics can be used by the advertising account rather than configured twice in two places with two sets of rules.
Why that third point matters. Fewer definitions.
A business measuring enquiries differently in two systems will get two answers and trust neither. One definition used by both is a smaller thing to maintain.
What it changes about your monthly review. One place.
Paid, organic, referral and direct sitting in one report, compared on the same terms. A business currently reading two dashboards and mentally adding them is doing arithmetic it does not need to do.
What it will not give you. A single number.
The two will still report different totals for the same period, which block four is about. Linking improves the view rather than resolving the arithmetic.
The Interaction Nobody Measures
Paid and organic results appear on the same page for the same searches. So the two are not independent channels running in parallel. They interact. A business reporting them separately has no way of seeing how.
The overlap. Same search, two entries.
Your advertisement and your ordinary result can both appear for one query. Somebody clicking the advertisement is recorded as paid. They might have clicked the unpaid result had the advertisement not been there.
What that does to the figures. Moves credit.
Advertising appears to produce visits that organic would otherwise have delivered. Both systems report accurately and the combined picture is misleading.
How the effect becomes visible. A pause.
When advertising stops, organic traffic for the same terms frequently rises. That relationship is only observable if both sets of data sit together and somebody looked before and after.
What we will not tell you. What to do about it.
Whether that means advertising is wasted, valuable or somewhere between depends on your margins, your competition and your capacity. That is an advertising decision and we do not sell advertising.
The version worth watching. Your own name.
Advertising against searches for your own business is the clearest case of the overlap, since those people were looking for you specifically. Whether it is worth paying for them is a judgement the joined data informs rather than settles.
What we will say. Measure before deciding.
Anybody advising you to increase or cut advertising without having looked at the interaction is advising you without evidence.
Attribution Gets Complicated Here
Once paid and organic data sit in one place, the question of which one gets credit for an outcome stops being academic. Somebody who saw an advertisement, left, searched again a week later and enquired has been touched by both. Only one of them will be credited.
Why linking sharpens it. Both are now visible.
Before, each system credited itself within its own reporting and nobody noticed the overlap. Joined, the same outcome can be seen from two directions and the difference becomes obvious.
Why the systems disagree. Different rules.
How long after a click something still counts, plus which interaction receives the credit, are set differently in each. Neither is wrong and they were never going to produce one number.
What that means for reporting. Do not add them.
Advertising conversions plus analytics conversions is not a total. It is one outcome counted twice under two rulebooks. Reports built that way overstate everything.
What to do about it. Pick one and state it.
Choose which system is your record for outcomes, say so on every report and stop switching. Consistency is worth more than precision here.
Where the modelling is explained. Its own guide.
Attribution modelling covers how credit is assigned and why search is consistently undercredited. This page only explains why joining paid data makes those choices matter more.
What You Need
Administrative access at both ends, meaning permission to change each account rather than to read it. That is where most attempts stop. The reason is nearly always the same.
On the analytics side. Editing rights.
Enough permission to alter the property's configuration. Viewer access lets you read reports and will not let you connect anything.
On the advertising side. Administrative rights.
The equivalent level on the advertising account. Being able to see campaigns is not the same as being able to link the account to something else.
Where it stalls. An agency holds one.
Frequently the advertising account was created by whoever runs the campaigns, on their own login. The business has never held administrative access to it.
Why that is worth noticing. It is a bigger issue.
If you cannot link the account, you also cannot pause it, export its history or hand it to somebody else. The connection is simply where the problem gets discovered.
What good access looks like. You can remove people.
The test is not whether you can log in. It is whether you could remove somebody else's access tomorrow. If you cannot, you are a guest on your own advertising account.
What to do first. Ask for access.
Before attempting the link. It is a reasonable request, it is easier while relations are good and block six is why it matters beyond this task.
Ownership, Again
The advertising account should be in the business name with agencies added as users, for exactly the reasons the analytics property should be. It matters more here, because an advertising account accumulates things that cannot be recreated.
What an advertising account holds. Years of work.
Spending history, performance data, audience information and conversion configuration built up over time. None of it transfers to a fresh account.
What losing it costs. Starting again.
A new account begins with no history at all, which affects how the system treats it. That is a real cost rather than an inconvenience.
How it happens. Speed at the start.
Somebody set it up quickly while logged into their own account during onboarding. Rarely deliberate and the consequence is identical either way.
The pattern across all of them. Three accounts.
Analytics, advertising and your business listing. The same question applies to each and the answer should be the same for all three.
When to sort it out. Now.
Access is transferred easily during a working relationship and with difficulty at the end of one. Our hiring material covers the commitment worth asking any agency for.
The question to ask before signing anything. Whose account.
Any new supplier proposing to run advertising should be asked whether the account will be created in your name. It is a short question at the start of a relationship and an awkward one at the end.
Where the rest sits. The hub.
Everything on this tool is on the Google Analytics guide. defining what counts as a result is the page to read before either connection is worth much.
Paid and organic
compete for the
same searches.
Separately, you
cannot see it.
Your advertisement and your ordinary result can appear for one query. Somebody clicking the advertisement is recorded as paid even though the unpaid result was right there. Both systems report accurately. The combined picture is misleading. It only becomes visible when the data sits together.
What we look at when both are running:
What you then do about the advertising is a decision for you and whoever runs it. We will not advise on that, since we do not sell it.
Every guide.
One tool.
Getting it installed and configured properly, reading the reports without being misled, measuring outcomes rather than activity, the advanced reporting and what to do when the numbers look wrong.
