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Link Your Google Analytics and AdWords Accounts

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

  • Link AdWords and Google Analytics.
  • Edit or delete a link.

Linking your AdWords account to your Analytics property lets you see the full customer cycle. You can see how users interact with your marketing, such as by clicking on ads. You can see how users complete the goals you’ve set on your site, whether that’s making purchases or consuming content. Specifically, when you link AdWords and Analytics, you can:

  • See ad and site performance data in the AdWords reports in Analytics.
  • Import Analytics goals and ecommerce transactions into your AdWords account.
  • Import Analytics metrics like bounce rate, average session duration, and pages or session visits into your AdWords account.
  • Enhance your AdWords remarketing with Analytics Remarketing and Dynamic Remarketing.
  • Get richer data in the Analytics Multi-Channel Funnels reports.

Learn more in this short video.

Before you start, make sure that you're using a Google Account that has edit permission for the Analytics property and administrative access for the AdWords accounts.

Note: These permissions are required only for the linking process. After you create the link, you can modify the permissions or remove them entirely.

The linking wizard makes it easy to link your AdWords accounts to multiple views of your Analytics property. If you have multiple Analytics properties that want to link to your AdWords accounts, complete the linking process for each property.

To link AdWords and Analytics:

  1. From Google Analytics, click Admin and select the account and property you want to link.
  2. In the Property column, click Google Ads.
  3. Click + NEW LINK GROUP
  4. Select the AdWords accounts you want to link, then click Continue.
  5. If you have an AdWords manager account, select that account to link it (and all of its child accounts).
  6. If you want to link only some managed accounts, expand the manager account, then select each of the managed AdWords accounts that you want to link. Or, click All Linkable to select all of managed AdWords accounts, and then deselect individual accounts.
  7. Turn linking ON for each view in the property in which you want AdWords data.
  8. If you want, select Enable Google Display Network Impression Reporting to include that data in each view.
  9. If you've already enabled auto-tagging in your AdWords accounts, or if you want to let the linking process automatically enable auto-tagging in your AdWords accounts, skip to the next step.
  10. If you want to manually tag your AdWords links, click Advanced settings > Leave my auto-tagging settings as they are.
  11. Click Link accounts.

Congratulations! Your accounts are now linked. If you opted to use auto-tagging (that’s what we recommend), Analytics starts automatically associating your AdWords data with customer clicks.

When you link an AdWords account and an Analytics property, anyone with access to the views you selected during linking can see your imported AdWords data. Likewise, if you choose to import Analytics data (such as goals or ecommerce transactions, metrics, or remarketing lists) into your AdWords account, anyone with access to that AdWords account can see your imported Analytics data.

Once you create a link group, you can add or remove AdWords accounts and Analytics views from that group. You can also rename the link group.

To edit a link group:

  1. From Google Analytics, click Admin and select the account and property you want to edit.
  2. In the Property column, click AdWords Linking.
  3. In the table, click the link group that you want to edit.
  4. To add or remove AdWords accounts from your link group, click Edit in the Select linked AdWords accounts section, and check or uncheck the boxes next to those accounts.
  5. To add or remove Analytics views, click Edit in the Link configuration section. Turn linking on or off as necessary.
  6. Click Save.

Note: You can also open Analytics from within your AdWords account. Click the Tools tab, select Analytics, and then follow the rest of these instructions.

If you want to unlink all of the AdWords accounts in a link group from your Analytics property, you need to delete the entire link group.

Keep in mind that if you delete a link group, all data stops flowing between your AdWords and Analytics accounts.

  • AdWords data such as clicks, impressions, or CPC, will no longer be visible in Analytics reports. Session data up until the time you unlink the account is still available. Any new sessions that result from clicks in these linked AdWords accounts after you have unlinked appears in Analytics reports as (not set).
  • Your Analytics remarketing lists stop accumulating new users.
  • AdWords stops importing all Analytics goals, ecommerce transactions, and metrics you configured.

Note: Once Analytics data (for example, goals) is imported to AdWords, it is subject to the AdWords terms of service.

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