How to Link Google Adwords with Google Analytics

You’ve got a Google Adwords account, and you also have Google Analytics set up for your website, but how do you connect the two? It is a process that only takes about two minutes but is very important to do. After you link Google Adwords with Google Analytics, you will be able to see additional performance metrics of your ads and keywords in Adwords, set up a re-marketing campaign, and import your conversion goals.

How to Link Them

1. Log in to the gmail account that has full access to both your Google Analytics and Adwords.
2. Once in your analytics account, click the ADMIN button at the bottom left of the page, marked with a gear icon.

3. Once you are in settings, under the “Property” column, click on Adwords Linking.

4. Select the Adwords account you would like to link from the list of accounts associated with the email address you’re using.

5. On the next screen, turn on sharing for the view you would like to share. In this example it is called “All Website Data” but if you have multiple views set up, they will appear here. Also check that yes, you would like to share your Analytics data with linked Adwords accounts.

6. Select Link Accounts and you are set! It can take 24-48 hours to populate in Adwords.

You will now be able to view valuable engagement metrics in Google Adwords, like bounce rates for certain keywords and session durations for every ad. These aren’t the only reasons to link Google Adwords with Google Analytics though. This next section will explain two more valuable ways you can now use Analytics and Adwords together.

Why Link Google Adwords with Google Analytics?

In addition to seeing your Analytics data like bounce rates and session durations in Adwords, you can also now set up re-marketing campaigns and import your goals into Adwords to enable conversion tracking. Let me explain why these two things are so important.

Re-Marketing

A re-marketing, or re-targeting, campaign is when you show ads to users who have visited your website in the past. These types of ads are excellent for pretty much every type of business. Seeing re-marketing ads will keep your business in front of people during their decision process and will help catch leads that weren’t quite ready to commit the first time they visited your website.

Now that your Analytics and Adwords accounts are linked, you can use Analytics to start building an audience to advertise to in Adwords. To learn how to do this, check out this article.

Importing Goals and Setting Up Conversion Tracking

If you have goals set up in Google Analytics, you can now import these goals into Adwords. You will do this in your Adwords account under Tools, and then under Conversions.

There, you can select which of your goals from Analytics you would like to track in Adwords.

The benefit of setting up conversion tracking in Adwords is that you can now see which ads and keywords were associated with conversions. If you’d like to, you can use some of the bidding strategies that require conversion tracking.

Linking Google Adwords with Google Analytics

Every business using both Adwords and Analytics should have the two accounts linked. It gives you a chance to better analyze your data, which means campaigns that run better and money better spent. Many don’t even realize they need to manually do this task, but is well worth the two minutes it takes to accomplish.