Google Analytics is a powerful tool that can help you keep track of how people use your website. It gives insights into your users, such as where they're coming from, how long they stay and how they move through your website. With AdWords, the focus is on getting users to your website, but that's only half the battle. Google Analytics fills that gap by providing understanding of what they do once they arrive. When using both together, you can additionally track things like which ads lead to the most clicks and conversions, allowing you to optimize your campaigns to focus on the ads that are performing the best.
Setup
Linking Google Analytics and AdWords
To take advantage of this feature, the first step is to link your Google Analytics account with your AdWords account. If you use the same login for both of these, they will be already linked. Otherwise, you'll need to manually link them according to these directions.
Linking goes both ways, so in addition to getting Analytics data in your AdWords account, you'll be able to access AdWords data in your Google Analytics account as well. This one-time setup cannot be performed via the API, so you'll need to log in to the AdWords UI to link the accounts.
Turning on auto-tagging
When using Google Analytics with your AdWords account, it is essential to turn on auto-tagging, if you haven't already. This can be done by setting the boolean value in the Customer class within CustomerService or via the AdWords UI.
Auto-tagging is an account-wide feature that will apply to all ads and campaigns in your account. When enabled, tracking information will be added to the URL so that the landing page can determine which specific ad was clicked. Using information passed in this manner, Google Analytics will be able to understand the relationship between a given visit to your landing page and the ad that triggered that view from AdWords.
Reporting
Once you've successfully linked your AdWords account to your Google Analytics account and imported the Analytics data into AdWords reports through the AdWords UI, the additional Analytics columns will begin appearing in AdWords reports. These columns will show you statistics on what users do on your website after clicking an ad. Because of the power of Google Analytics, these statistics aren't just for your landing page, but for your site as a whole. See the table below for the four Google Analytics columns in the AdWords API.
| Column | Description |
|---|---|
| BounceRate | The percentage of clicks that hit your site, but didn't do anything else; they just landed and left. |
| AverageTimeOnSite | Average of how long users were on your site after clicking an ad. |
| AveragePageViews | Average number of pages on your website users visited after clicking an ad. |
| PercentNewVisitors | An estimate of the percentage of users clicking on an ad who had never visited your site before. |
The supported performance reports in the API are
Analytics columns are available in these reports, so you can break down the data at whatever level you like within your account. To make sure that these columns are being correctly populated, verify your setup steps from this help center article.
Analytics API
Linking your AdWords and Google Analytics accounts benefits the AdWords API by allowing you to see some basic statistics from Google Analytics. On top of that, the link works the other way, allowing you to fetch AdWords-specific data using the Google Analytics API.
Once you sign up for the Google Analytics API, you can use it to run queries that fetch AdWords data using the Core Reporting API. You can get fields like CampaignID, AdGroupID, and CriterionID to match up data from Google Analytics with its source in AdWords. You can read about how to set up and make these requests in the Google Analytics article on AdWords integrations. We also provide a list of AdWords dimensions available in the Google Analytics API.
Remarketing
Note that remarketing via the AdWords API is independent from that set up in Google Analytics+AdWords accounts. You cannot share remarketing lists between the two, and each method has its own reporting. To find more about remarketing in Google Analytics+AdWords, read these two articles:
Resources
- Link your AdWords and Google Analytics accounts: How-to on setting up your account to take advantage of Google Analytics.
- Report Definitions: Report columns reference.
- Google Analytics API: Getting started guide for the Analytics API.
- Dimensions & Metrics Explorer: Lists and describes the dimensions and metrics available through the Analytics Core Reporting API.
