Link AdWords to Analytics

Why you want to do this:

- Its going to save you a lot of money (at least 10% of your adspend if you actually use the information you’ll get)
- Its free
- It will show you way more about what’s going on in your AdWords account than your AdWords stats can tell you.
- It will take less than 30 minutes

The hardest part of linking AdWords to Analytics: Sorting out your AdWords/Analytics and Google accounts. It makes life easier to have only one AdWords account and one Analytics account per Google Account. Please note that a “Google account” is different than an “AdWords account”. By “Google account” I mean your gmail.com and whatever other Google tools/services you use under that Google account email address.

A note for beginners, or people who are confused by the Google Accounts usage: When logged into your AdWords account right now, you’re “in” both your AdWords account and your Google account. If you were to type a search phrase directly into that little Google bar at the top of your browser right now, you’d see in the top right corner that you’re still in your Google account, even though you are no longer in the AdWords interface.

I’m going to walk through each scenario of Google account funkiness, and show you some ways to get around the “one AdWords to one Analytics” account “restriction”.

Take a deep breathe. Now:

1) log into your adwords account

2) click on the tab “Reporting” > then select “Analytics”.

3) Here you’ll be able to either create a brand new Analytics account, or you can hook up to a new Analytics account.

If you have no pre-existing analytics account for the website you want to track and link to:

Select “Create my free Google Analytics account.” and click continue. In the next window, enter the url of the website you want to track, name it, and make sure that “Destination URL Auto-tagging” is checked. In the next window, agree to the terms and click continue.

In the next window, you’ll be given the code that needs to go on every page of the website you want to track. The code needs to go right before each page’s closing “” tag. If you don’t know what this is, do a view source on any page and look for it near the very bottom of the page. If you’re not comfortable pasting the code into your webpages, send your webmaster the code and ask them. But sure you’ve copied ALL the code – don’t miss the last line.

After the code is in place (don’t worry – you can copy the code, take a few mins to paste it into your pages and then come back… Google will save your work), get back that same page and click “finish”. You’ll then be brought to the Analytics reports main page.

To verify that the code is installed properly, click on the “edit” link under the Actions area (to the right of the page), and then on the next page click “Check Status” (at the right of the top grey bar). You may have to wait up to an hour for Google to recognize the code. That delay might not happen at all, or it might be only 15 mins… but I have seen it be as much as an hour.

Once the code is verified, your Adwords account is now linked to your Analytics account. Wait a day and then have some fun clicking around. You’re about to see a new world (OK, a tiny microcosm of the world, but it is at least a new view).

If you have a pre-existing analytics account for the website you want to track and link to:

a) Does it use the same login info as the AdWords account you’re in now? Then just go ahead and select “I already have a Google Analytics account. Please link it to this AdWords account.”

In the next screen you’ll see a drop-down selector that will show the Analytics accounts you can link to.

If you don’t see that or there are no accounts in the drop-down menu, you’ll need to click “Cancel”, log out of your AdWords (and current Google) account. Go over to the Analytics main page and log into the pre-existing Analytics account you want to link to your AdWords account.

We’re going to have to add your AdWords username to this Analytics account as one of the Account Admins. To do that, go to the main websites profile view in Analytics (its the first page you’ll be brought to after login). Find the site you want to add the Account Admin to, then click “Edit” under the actions setting (to the right of the page). On the settings page, scroll down to the bottom and look for the last grey bar that reads “Users with Access to Profile”. Click “Add User” on the right of that bar. Enter the email address / Adwords login for the AdWords account you want to link and use the pull-down bar for “Access Type” to set the permissions to “Account Administrator”. Click Save changes and log out.

Go back to the AdWords login and login with the same email that you just added as an Admin in Analytics. Go back to the Analytics hook up page where before you didn’t see any sites in the pull-down bar. You will now see your previously unavailable Analytics account. Select it and continue. Your AdWords and Analytics accounts are now linked.

A note about access: People who have access to your Analytics account will not have access to your AdWords account. Ie, if they have the login to the Analytics account, they will not be able to get in or see through from your Analytics account to your Adwords account. Access only goes from AdWords to Analytics, not vice versa.