If you are a website owner, you most likely have Google Analytics installed on your website. And if you are running AdWords, you may assume that your AdWords data would automatically show up in your Google Analytics account. They are both Google products after all, right? Wrong.

If you want your AdWords data to show up in your Analytics account, you will need to manually go into your Analytics account and choose to link it to your AdWords account.

Firstly, why link Google Analytics to AdWords?

So, why would you want to link the two? Well, the answer is because Analytics will give you A LOT more data about what is happening with your AdWords traffic.

It will tell you basic information like

• the bounce rate – the percentage number of people who left your website in under 30 seconds
• how many pages of content were viewed
• which exact pages of content were viewed
• etc

You can see a sample of what I mean in this screenshot:

The basic information that is shown is important since you want to gauge if the traffic that you are paying for is engaged. What you don’t want is to pay for traffic and for it to be leaving straight away, i.e. high bounce rate. It is also beneficial to know if there they are being sent to the right page. You can see this from observing the behaviour flow of content and association conversion rates.

If you would like more specific information about which specific campaigns or keywords have a high bounce rate or low average session duration, you can drill down even further. The point is, that you can get this information and it is extremely useful in understanding visitor behaviour, both on an overall level and also on a very detailed level. And importantly, if you feel it can be improved, it can help you determine how you can improve it.

However, the true value of getting Google Analytics and AdWords to ‘talk’ to each other is in the advanced information it can provide. AdWords data in Google Analytics has the power to give you significantly more information, and even has its own section within Analytics.

There really is so much to talk about that we will save Advanced Google Analytics data insights for another time. So stay tuned for more information.

So, how do you link Google Analytics with your AdWords account?

Fortunately, it is super easy to do.

Go into the Admin Section of your Google Analytics account.

Under the Property section,  there will be a link to AdWords Linking. Just click on that, and you will be able to choose your account.

You can have a look at the screenshot below which will help.

So, even if you are brand new to Google Analytics, the first step is getting them to ‘talk’ to each other. If the data doesn’t seem to make any sense or you are confused, you can contact us and we can help translate some of the data into meaningful and actionable information which is powerful for any business.