Google Analytics and Google Ads

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Linking Google Ads and Google Analytics 4 (GA4)

For deep-dive reporting into the interactions that happened after someone clicks you PPC ad, you can link your Google Ads account to Google Analytics and GA4. This allows you to see all your cost data, impression data, and various metrics from Google Ads, and attribute that to ecommerce sales, or to other goals that you’ve set up in Google Analytics.

Linking Google Ads to Google Analytics is a very straightforward process. First, sign in to both platforms and navigate to the Admin tab in GA4. Then choose Google Ads linking from the Property level in Google Analytics and GA4 and select the Accounts or Manager account to link.

Benefits

Linking Google Ads to Google Analytics offers several tangible benefits to digital marketers. It enhances your reporting with detailed website engagement data and allows you to see how paid search channels perform against other channels.

You can also measure ROAS for ecommerce businesses and get a deeper understanding of what searchers do post-click, which is really valuable information to have at your fingertips. Linking also allows you to share and import ecommerce conversions, goals, and remarketing audiences from Google Analytics and GA4 back into Google Ads.

Linking also allows you to share and import ecommerce conversions, goals, and remarketing audiences from GA4 back into Google Ads.

Accessing Google Analytics

To access Google Analytics from Google Ads, use the Shortcut to Google Analytics in the Tools and Settings tab in Google Ads. This tab provides fast access to the linked Google Analytics account, where you can begin to analyze campaign performance in terms of website engagements, conversions, events, and ecommerce activity.

You can also access the planning tools, look at attribution modelling and conversion data, preview your ads in a test environment, and view or alter the change history. This allows you to see when changes were made, by who, and revert to the previous state if necessary.

Accessing the data

To access Google Ads data in Google Analytics is quite straightforward. To see your Google Ads cost, click, and impression data, for example, navigate to the Acquisition tab in Google Analytics and choose the Google Ads menu.

Here, you can see the linked accounts in your Manager account, campaigns, sitelinks, keywords, search queries, and so on, all segmented by hour of day. You can further segment your data by adding a secondary dimension to the report to see how each keyword performs in comparison to other data points, such as device type and date, for example.

This view gives you detailed website engagement, goal conversions, ecommerce, and click data all in one Google Ads view. It’s important to note, however, that this is a reporting view only. You can’t make any changes to Google Ads campaigns from Google Analytics. Its sole purpose is for viewing Google Ads metrics only.

Likewise, when Google Ads is linked to GA4, you can see top-performing channels and conversion paths in the Advertising section of GA4.

When metrics are used in this way to focus PPC campaigns, it can help drive significant positive impact for your media investment.

Example: European airline

Let’s look at an example. In the travel industry, a national European airline's revenue increased significantly from an eight-figure quarterly total to a nine-figure total of over $100,000,000 by applying a three-step methodology to campaign budget investment.

So, how did they achieve this? By using Google Analytics to identify the conversion clusters of revenue and sales in terms of the main markets, the devices, and the keywords customers typically bought with, the airline then created segmented lists of keywords, single-keyword Ad Groups, and campaigns and then targeted them based on how much revenue they generated, in a particular location, and on a particular device. As a result, they could measure the revenue per keyword, which could be sense-checked against cost per click and cost per sale to establish an ROI model. From this model, they could invest more in certain keywords for an almost guaranteed revenue return based on the forecast.

It turned out that just five keywords drove 95% of all revenue, so the airline removed these five top-performing keywords from its existing campaigns and created five new campaigns that contained just one Ad Group and one keyword each – that is, single-keyword campaigns for the most important keywords. These new campaigns would run alongside its existing campaigns that contained multi-keyword Ad Groups as it’s not feasible to run just single keyword ad groups or campaigns, and this structure it gave the airline the ability to focus its daily budget on its top-performing keywords.

The new campaigns contained one keyword on exact match. Each of these keywords was allocated a daily spend on the campaign level, meaning that the keywords that drove 95% of the revenue had their own daily budget allocated to them. This budget was not shared with other keywords in a campaign, as there was only one keyword per campaign.

This meant that the most important keywords never ran out of daily budget and they could be focused solely on the most important devices and locations, based on how and where people bought flights. The five new campaigns were then duplicated, and the keywords set to phrase match to drive reach for the most important keywords. By mimicking the success of the exact match campaigns, the phrase match campaigns helped to build reach and scale by ensuring that the most important keywords were always serving ads on the devices, and in the locations where customers bought most often.