Strangely, not everyone realises you can do this. It’s definitely worthwhile because Google Analytics and Google AdWords working together can tell you a whole lot more about the traffic you are getting from your AdWords ads than the AdWords control centre can on its own.
Not quite so strangely, some people, even when they know that AdWords and Analytics accounts can be linked, struggle to actually do it. Why? Well, this is one of those things that Google has made much more complicated than you’d think would be really necessary. “Surely it would be just a case of clicking a box in AdWords asking you if you want to link your AdWords account to your Analytics account, and then selecting the account to be linked?” you might ask.
Well, you’d think so, wouldn’t you…?
Unfortunately, it’s a little bit more involved than that, and some of Google’s own help pages give the wrong answer and are really unhelpful! So, if you do want to link your AdWords account to your Analytics account (and trust me, if you use AdWords you really do), follow these rather more straightforward (if rather lengthy) instructions…
1. Make sure you have rights as ‘Administrator’ to your Analytics account:
a. Sign into Analytics and select your account and profile (if you have more than one)
b. Click on the ‘Users’ tab. Your email address should appear and the role should say ‘Administrator’. If it doesn’t, you will need to ask an existing administrator to give you Administrator level access.
2. Make sure you have rights as ‘Administrator’ to your AdWords account:
a. Sign into AdWords.
b. From the My Account drop down box, select ‘Account Access’.
c. If you can see your email address under ‘Users with account access’ and the access level shows as ‘Administrative access’, you’re fine. If you can’t see your email address at all, but you got this far, don’t worry – it’s probably because you (or someone logged in with your email address) created the account. If that’s the case, and you got this far, you probably do have administrative access.
d. (If you work for an AdWords agency and have an MCC account, you need to go to the MCC screen and then the Account Access screen from there to see what sort of access you have to the accounts in your MCC.)
3. Oh, and the email address that shows as having Administrator access to your Analytics account must be the same email address as the one that shows as having Administrator access to your AdWords account.
4. If you don’t have Administrator access to both products with the same email address, you will need to ask an existing Administrator nicely if he will give you those rights!
5. Sign into your AdWords account, and from the Tools and Analysis drop down menu, select ‘Google Analytics’.
6. Click on the ‘Admin’ button in the top right corner of the page. This shows all the Analytics accounts associated with your login (you may only have the one).
7. Click on the Analytics Account you want to link to.
8. Click on the ‘Data Sources’ tab (next to ‘Properties’, ‘Users’, ‘Filters’ etc).
9. Click on the ‘Link Accounts’ button. (If there is no button, but there is a big green tick, this means your AdWords account is already linked to Analytics.)
10. Select ‘Auto-tag my links’.
11. Select the Analytics profile or profiles that you want to have use with the AdWords data from the drop-down button under ‘Which Analytics profiles should this AdWords Account be linked to?’
12. Click ‘Continue’.
13. You should now see the green tick – congratulations you’ve linked your AdWords and Analytics accounts!
14. AdWords can now send data to Analytics. Go away for a while or a few hours, depending upon how many clicks you expect to see from your AdWords ads, and come back after you’ve had some clicks. Now go into Analytics (either from the Analytics control screen, or from AdWords, by clicking on ‘Tools and Analysis’ and then ‘Google Analytics’), go to Traffic Sources, then Sources, Search and Paid. You should see some data from your AdWords campaign – but nothing before the date you did steps one to thirteen.
