- Link your Google Analytics and Google Ads accounts to track visits to your site from your ads.
- View the Google Analytics data for your ads and your ads' performance in your Smart campaigns' overview.
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By using Google Analytics and Google Ads, you can measure how well your website meets your business expectations. One way to measure your ads' performance is to track completed activities on your website (also known as conversions) that lead to the success of your business, like making a purchase or signing up for a newsletter.
If you’re already using Google Analytics to track traffic to and on your website, you can link your Google Analytics account and Google Ads account. Once both accounts are linked, you can then see your Google Analytics metrics driven by ads in your Smart campaigns' overview.
Advantages of linking your Google Analytics to Smart campaigns
Smart campaigns use Google Ads technology and AI to deliver real results to your business with minimal setup time and without ongoing management. By setting up conversions with Google Analytics and linking Google Analytics to your Smart campaigns, the AI-driven Smart campaign can work even better to deliver real, measurable results to your business.
How to get started
1. Link your accounts
To link your Google Analytics and Google Ads accounts, both accounts will need to use the same login email address.
If you already have a Google Analytics account with the same login email address, we’ll show the option to link your accounts in your Smart campaigns' overview. If you don't have a Google Analytics account yet, we can create one for you directly in Google Ads.
Notes
- If you create a new Analytics account from Google Ads and your business is subject to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), you must accept the Data Processing Terms for your analytics data. Please log in to your Analytics account to review and accept those terms.
- Smart campaigns linked to Google Analytics will import and enable conversions for all Google Ads campaigns. If you have multiple Smart campaigns, once you link one Smart campaign to Google Analytics, all other Smart campaigns will become linked as well.
- If you have other Google Ads campaign types (e.g. Search campaign, Display campaigns, etc.) that use Smart Bidding for conversions, importing and enabling conversions for your Smart campaigns may affect the bidding of these other campaign types.
To exclude these conversions from being used for Smart Bidding of other campaign types, they can be excluded by unticking them in the Include in Conversions setting.
2. Add Google Analytics Tracking ID to your website
Tracking IDs
Google Analytics provides a tracking ID for every website that you want to monitor for traffic. That tracking ID is a string like UA-000000-01. The tracking ID (also known as a Google Analytics JavaScript snippet) must be added to each page of your website.
During the Google Ads setup of Analytics, you can find your tracking ID under 'Connect your website'.
Once you have your tracking ID, go into your content management system (CMS), which is the tool that you use to maintain your website, and find the settings page where you can enter Google Analytics tracking IDs.
Some CMSs simplify Analytics tracking-code installation by offering plug-ins that install it on your web pages. Review your platform’s instructions to add your Analytics tracking ID.
Here are instructions for setting up Analytics with some common website providers:
- GoDaddy
- Google Blogger
- Google Sites
- Jimdo Creator
- Jimdo Dolphin
- Magento
- One.com
- Prestashop
- Shopify
- Squarespace
- Wordpress.com (for business)
- Wix
- Weebly
Analytics tags
If you set up your Tracking ID with one of the CMSs listed above (like Shopify, Squarespace, etc.), then you're done! If you're editing your website code manually, you'll need to add a Google Analytics tag to each page on your website.
A Google Analytics tag is a snippet of JavaScript that collects and sends data from a website to Google Analytics. It’s generated for every website or web page. You can paste your unedited snippet, in its entirety, into every web page that you want to track, by adding the snippet immediately before the closing </head> tag.
Learn how to set up the web Analytics tag in the Google Analytics Help Centre.
3. Add or edit destination goals
You can set destination goals to track how often your customers land on a certain page of your website after clicking on your ad. You should add destination goals to pages that show significant actions like Contact, Purchase, Registration or Sign-up pages. Efficient destination goals help you measure how successfully your ads drive customers to your business.
Once you add a destination goal, it will be added to your Google Analytics setting and reported in your Smart campaign dashboard.
Example
You want to use your ads to drive sign-ups to your website, 'yourpage.co.uk'.
Whenever someone signs up on your website, they are redirected to a page with the URL 'yourpage.co.uk/finish-sign-up'. Setting a destination goal with this page URL shows how many customers sign up to your website.