How to Link Google Ads and Google Analytics 4

Connecting your Google Ads and Google Analytics 4 accounts is one of the most powerful things you can do to understand how your advertising actually impacts your business. This simple integration unlocks a much deeper layer of reporting, helping you move beyond basic ad metrics to see the complete customer journey. This guide will walk you through exactly why this connection is so vital and provide a step-by-step process for linking your accounts today.

Why Bother Connecting Google Ads and Google Analytics 4?

You might be thinking, "I can see clicks, cost, and conversions inside Google Ads just fine. What’s the big deal?" Linking the two platforms bridges a critical gap. Google Ads tells you what happens before the click (impressions, CTR, cost), while GA4 tells you what happens after the click (engagement, conversions, user behavior).

When you bring them together, you get a complete view of campaign performance. Here are the core benefits:

• Richer Campaign Data: See your Google Ads cost, click, and impression data directly within your GA4 reports. This lets you analyze campaign performance alongside key on-site metrics like engagement rate, bounce rate, and time on site without flipping between platforms.
• Smarter Bidding with GA4 Conversions: This is arguably the most important reason. GA4 is more powerful at tracking complex user actions. You can designate virtually any user event as a conversion in GA4 - like a video view, a specific scroll depth, or a multi-step form submission - and then import it into Google Ads as a conversion goal. This allows Google's Smart Bidding algorithms to optimize your campaigns for the actions that truly matter to your business, not just last-click sales.
• Powerful Remarketing Audiences: GA4 provides incredibly detailed audience-building tools. You can create highly specific audience segments based on user behavior (e.g., "users who added items to their cart but did not purchase" or "users from my top-performing ad campaign who visited the pricing page"). Once you link your accounts, you can immediately use these precise GA4 audiences in your Google Ads remarketing campaigns.
• See the Full Customer Journey: Easily see how your ad clicks contribute to conversions down the road. You can see how paid traffic interacts with your other channels, like organic search or email, helping you understand the true value of your advertising efforts within a larger marketing context.

Before You Begin: What You'll Need

To ensure a smooth setup process, you need the right permissions in both Google Ads and Google Analytics. It's a quick check that will save you a lot of potential headaches.

• You must have Admin access on the Google Ads account you want to link.
• You must have Edit permission for the Google Analytics 4 property that you want to link.

It's also important to make sure you're using the same Google email address for both platforms with these permission levels. While not strictly necessary, it simplifies the process significantly.

Step-by-Step Guide: How to Link Google Analytics 4 to Google Ads

The good news is that Google has made this process fairly straightforward. It only takes a few minutes if you have the correct permissions. Just follow these steps.

1. Sign in to Your Google Ads Account

Start by navigating to https://ads.google.com and signing into the account you wish to connect to GA4.

2. Go to the "Linked accounts" Section

In the top navigation bar, find the "Tools & settings" icon (it looks like a wrench). Click on it. A menu will drop down. Under the "Setup" column, click on "Linked accounts."

This page is your central hub for connecting all sorts of Google and third-party products to Google Ads, such as a YouTube channel, Merchant Center, or Salesforce.

3. Find and Open the GA4 Integration Details

On the "Linked accounts" page, you'll see a list of available services. Find the box labeled "Google Analytics & Firebase" and click the "Details" link inside it.

4. Link Your GA4 Property

You will now see a table listing all the GA4 properties you have "Edit" access to. Locate the specific property you want to connect to this Google Ads account.

In the "Actions" column next to the property name, click the blue "Link" text. A confirmation pane will appear on the right side of your screen. You have two important settings here:

1. Import Google Analytics audiences after linking: This should be turned on by default. Leave it enabled. This allows you to immediately share remarketing audiences from GA4 to Google Ads.
2. Enable campaign attribution from Google Ads to your property reporting: This setting is optional and typically used in different user-access management structures. For most users, you can leave the default configuration as is.

Click the "Link" button at the bottom of the pane.

5. Enable Auto-Tagging

After your initial linkage is created, you may see recommendations to enable auto-tagging. If it is not on automatically, go to "Settings," then "Account Settings." Click to expand the "Auto-tagging" section, check the box for "Tag the URL that people click through from my ad" and save this.

Auto-tagging is a critical setting that automatically adds a "GCLID" (Google Click Identifier) parameter to your URLs. This is the unique code that lets Google Ads and Google Analytics talk to each other and pass detailed information back and forth. Without auto-tagging enabled, your integration won’t work correctly. After linking, you can come back to the "Linked Accounts" table and confirm its status, next to your freshly-linked account, the status for auto-tagging should say "Enabled."

6. Confirm the Linkage in Google Analytics 4

To double-check that everything is working, pop over to your GA4 property.

1. Login to your GA4 account.
2. Click on "Admin" (the gear icon) in the bottom-left corner.
3. In the "Property" column, find the "Product links" section and click on "Google Ads links."
4. You should see the Google Ads account you just connected, listed in the table with a "Linked" status.

And that’s it! Your accounts are now connected. Keep in mind it can take up to 24-48 hours for data to start flowing consistently between the platforms.

What Should You Do After Linking?

Linking your accounts is just the first step. The real magic happens when you start using the newly available information. Here are three things you should do right away.

1. Explore Your Google Ads Data in GA4 Reports

Once data starts to populate, head over to your GA4 reports to see your ad performance in context. Navigate to Reports > Acquisition > Traffic acquisition. Here, change the primary dimension to "Session source / medium." You’ll see traffic from "google / cpc" appear as its own line item. You can now analyze how users from your Google Ads campaigns are engaging with your site compared to users from other channels, like organic search or direct traffic.

2. Import Key GA4 Conversions into Google Ads

This moves your campaign optimization to the next level. Let's say you have an important engagement metric you're tracking in GA4, like a user signing up for your newsletter event named generate_lead.

First, mark the event as a conversion in GA4:

• Go to Admin > Data display > Events.
• Find the generate_lead event in your list.
• Toggle the switch in the "Mark as conversion" column to on.

Next, import that conversion into Google Ads:

• In your Google Ads account, go to Tools & settings > Measurement > Conversions.
• Click the blue "+ New conversion action" button.
• Choose "Import" and select "Google Analytics 4 properties," then click "Web."
• You will see a list of the GA4 conversion events you just enabled. Check the box next to generate_lead and click "Import and continue."

Now, generate_lead will appear as a conversion action in your Google Ads account. You can now set your campaign objectives to optimize for newsletter signups, allowing AI-powered bidding strategies like "Maximize conversions" to work their magic on a richer data set.

3. Build a Remarketing Audience in GA4

Let’s create a powerful audience of high-intent website visitors you can re-engage with Google Ads. For an e-commerce store, a classic remarketing audience is "Cart abandoners."

Here’s how to build it in GA4:

• Go to Admin > Data display > Audiences.
• Click "New audience."
• From the gallery, select "Add to carts but did not purchase" in the "Templates" tab. If you have a custom event taxonomy, you create your audience manually using logic such as, include users when event = add_to_cart and exclude users when event = purchase.
• Give your audience a helpful name like "GA4 - Cart Abandoners (30 Days)" and save.

Thanks to the account link you established earlier with audience imports enabled, this new remarketing list will automatically sync to your Google Ads shared library. You can then go into your Google Ads campaigns, target this specific list, and show them a compelling ad to bring them back and complete their purchase.

Final Thoughts

Linking Google Ads with Google Analytics 4 is no longer just a "nice to have" — it’s foundational for any business that relies on paid search. This straightforward process cracks open a new world of reporting, providing the cross-platform insights you need to build powerful audiences, track meaningful conversions, and ultimately assign budget to the campaigns that actually drive growth.

Bringing your Google Ads and GA4 data together is a great starting point, but it’s only two pieces of a larger puzzle. What about data from Facebook Ads, Shopify, Salesforce, or your other marketing platforms? That’s where we built Graphed to help. We make it easy to connect all your data sources in one place and build custom, real-time dashboards using simple, natural language. Instead of manually stitching reports together across a dozen tabs, you can just ask Graphed to "show me a report comparing Facebook Ads and Google Ads ROI for the last 30 days," and instantly get the answers you need.