Linking AdWords with Google Analytics and GWT

Make Better Decisions by Linking AdWords with Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools

A few weeks ago, Google announced that a new feature has been added in AdWords which will allow you to link Google Analytics and Google Webmaster tools (GWT) to AdWords. With all three working together, this will provide a better overview of how your PPC campaign impacts organic, and will also provide information on some engagement metrics in your AdWords account.

Google states -

this allows you to optimise your campaigns more effectively by bringing valuable data from other Google services to your AdWords reporting

But this also means no more flitting between GA and AdWords to analyse engagement metrics like time on site, bounce rate, number of pages visited and % of new visits. Yay!

Linking to Google Analytics

To implement this, you will need to go into the linked accounts area in AdWords, and add the GA profiles you want to associate with the account.

Once you have linked the accounts and hit save, this message will appear to confirm that this is set up correctly.

And voila! Your GA and AdWords accounts are now linked.

Now this doesn’t deliver any hugely groundbreaking data, but if you now go back into campaign view and customise your columns, there is now an option to add columns which show data from Google Analytics (shown below).

You can now see which campaigns are performing best in terms of user engagement, without having to check Analytics separately.

Linking to Google Webmaster Tools

As part of the announcement, it was revealed that the dimensions tab would also provide paid vs. organic search query data.

Seeing as Google is moving towards 100% not provided keyword data in Analytics, this could be a great tool, right? Well, half right. The search query data is going to be pulled from GWT, not Google Analytics, so it’s not going to be perfect. What it will provide is some insight into how PPC and SEO can work together, and shows how users engage when you are showing for a search query in organic listings, paid, or both at the same time.

To use this feature, you need to go to linked accounts, and then select Webmaster Tools. If you are the site owner, verification will be simple, but if not, you will need to send the request and give the webmaster a prod to pop into GWT and grant you access.

All being well, you will now be able to access this data via the dimensions tab. This data can be found under ‘Paid & Organic’. It will take time to populate, as it does not pull in historic data.

As this feature is relatively new, it will take time to gather and report on how useful this data is. It should provide insight into whether bidding on a term that you rank for organically is worthwhile.

What you will be able to see is shown below, but sadly, something this feature is missing is conversion data.

We will keep you updated once we have a big enough data set to make recommendations!

For more information, or for assistance in implementing this feature, contact a member of the PPC Team at High Position today.