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How to Track Google Ads Conversions in Google Analytics

Cody Schneider•

Seeing your Google Ads conversions in Google Analytics is the first step toward understanding the true impact of your ad spend. Instead of just knowing an ad was clicked, you can see what users actually do after landing on your site. This article walks you through how to connect your accounts, track the right conversions, and find the data you need to make smarter marketing decisions.

Why You Absolutely Need to Link Google Ads and Google Analytics

Connecting these two powerful platforms isn't just a "nice-to-have" option, it's essential for anyone serious about measuring campaign performance and ROI. The two tools are designed to work together, and by linking them, you unlock a much deeper level of analysis.

Here are the biggest benefits:

  • Get the Full Customer Journey: Google Ads tells you what happens before the click (impressions, clicks, CTR). Google Analytics tells you what happens after the click (time on site, pages per session, goal completions). Combining them shows you the complete path from ad view to conversion, revealing which campaigns drive not just clicks, but valuable on-site engagement.

  • Enrich Your Data in Both Platforms: The data flows both ways. You can import key GA4 metrics like bounce rate and average engagement time directly into your Google Ads reports. This lets you analyze ad performance using behavioral data, not just click data, all within the Google Ads interface.

  • Power Up Your Ad Bidding: You can use the conversions you set up in Google Analytics 4 (like "subscribed to newsletter" or "watched 75% of a video") as goals for Smart Bidding in Google Ads. This helps Google's algorithm optimize your campaigns for the actions that truly matter to your business, not just last-click sales.

  • Build Smarter Remarketing Audiences: This is a big one. Linking the accounts allows you to build highly specific audiences in GA4 and use them for your remarketing campaigns in Google Ads. For example, you could create an audience of users who came from a specific ad campaign, added an item to their cart, but didn't complete the purchase. This type of surgical targeting is incredibly difficult without the accounts being linked.

Getting Started: Your Pre-Flight Checklist

Before you dive in, make sure you have a few things in order to make the process as smooth as possible. You'll avoid a lot of common headaches by making sure you're prepared.

You will need:

  • Admin Access: You must have administrative permissions on both the Google Ads account and the Google Analytics property you want to link. If you’re managing accounts for a client, you’ll need to confirm you have the proper access level.

  • Matching Google Accounts: The easiest way to link the services is to use the same Google Account email address to access both Google Ads and Google Analytics.

  • Auto-Tagging Enabled: Auto-tagging is a feature inside Google Ads that automatically attaches a unique parameter (the GCLID, or "Google Click Identifier") to the end of your ad URLs. This is how Google Analytics knows a visitor came from one of your Google Ads. While the linking process in GA4 will prompt you to turn this on, it's good practice to check if it's already active.

How to Check if Auto-Tagging is Enabled in Google Ads

Don't worry, this only takes a second to check.

  1. Log into your Google Ads account.

  2. In the left-hand navigation menu, click on Admin.

  3. Go to Account Settings.

  4. You'll see a section called "Auto-tagging." Check that the box that says "Tag the URL that people click through from my ad" is checked. If it is, you're good to go.

Step-by-Step: Linking Your Google Ads and GA4 Accounts

Once you've run through the checklist, you’re ready to connect the accounts. The process only takes a couple of minutes.

  1. Navigate to the Admin Panel in GA4Log into your Google Analytics 4 property. In the bottom-left corner, click the gear icon labeled Admin.

  2. Find Product LinksLook for the "Property" column. Scroll down until you see the "Product Links" section and click on Google Ads Links.

  3. Initiate a New LinkYou will see a history of any existing links. Click the blue Link button at the top right to create a new one.

  4. Choose Your Google Ads AccountNext, click on Choose Google Ads accounts. A list of all Google Ads accounts associated with your Google Account will appear. Select the checkbox next to the account(s) you want to link. Double-check that the Account ID numbers match! When you're ready, click Confirm.

  5. Configure Your SettingsAfter confirming your account, click Next. You’ll be on the "Configure settings" page with a couple of important options:

    • Enable Personalized Advertising: Keep this on. This option allows your GA4 audiences to be used for remarketing campaigns in Google Ads. It’s one of the most powerful reasons to link the accounts.

    • Enable Auto-Tagging: You'll likely see this is already enabled by default. Leave it on. It ensures that your campaign data will report correctly in Google Analytics.

  6. Review and SubmitClick Next again to go to the final review screen. You’ll see a summary of the accounts you’re linking and the settings you’ve chosen. If everything looks correct, click Submit. That's it! Your accounts are now linked. It might take up to 24 hours for data to start populating in your reports.

How to Define Conversions in Google Analytics 4

Linking your accounts is an essential first step, but it doesn't automatically track your conversions. First, you need to tell GA4 which user actions you consider valuable. In GA4, almost everything a user does is considered an "event" - scrolling, clicking a button, viewing a page, etc. A "conversion" is just a normal event that you’ve marked as particularly important for your business.

Here are the two primary ways to set up conversions.

Method 1: Mark an Existing Event as a Conversion

Google Analytics 4 automatically collects many standard events out of the box. E-commerce sites will often already have events like add_to_cart, begin_checkout, and purchase. All you need to do is tell GA4 that you consider these events to be conversions. It's incredibly simple.

  1. In the GA4 Admin panel, click on Conversions under the "Property" column.

  2. On the Conversions page, click on the New conversion event.

  3. You'll be prompted to enter a specific event name. For example, if you want the event purchase to be marked as a conversion, you just simply enter that name in the text field.

Method 2: Create a Custom Event as a Conversion

What if the action you want to track isn't a pre-configured event? A common example is tracking when a user lands on a specific "thank you" or confirmation page after submitting a form.

To set this up, you create a custom event in Google Analytics and provide parameters for what constitutes that event.

  1. Go to the Admin panel, look for the "Property Settings", then go to "Data display", and select Events.

  2. Click the Create event button.

  3. In the configuration panel, give your new event a clear, descriptive name (e.g., contact_form_submission).

  4. In the "Matching Conditions", set your parameters. For a thank you page, it would look like this:

    • Parameter: event_name | Operator: equals | Value: page_view

    • AND

    • Parameter: page_location | Operator: contains | Value: /thank-you (use the part of your actual confirmation page URL).

  5. Click Create.

Finding Your Google Ads Data and Conversions in GA4 Reports

Now that everything is connected and your conversions are defined, where do you go to see the data? You'll find a dedicated "Advertising" section in your GA4 account's overview and your campaign reports. The other GA4 default reports can be modified with some basic customization to show a great deal more detail.

Go to the Reports tab in the left-hand navigation. You'll find your Google Ads metrics in the following places:

  • The "Advertising snapshot": This can be a goldmine of insights. You can discover, for example, which channels and campaigns are having the most success for a given time period or audience. In the "Conversion" reports, you'll not only see specific GA4 conversions such as page views and purchases, but also any other events that were flagged as a "conversion", and the different paths that customers take on the way to becoming conversions.

  • Under reports like "Traffic Acquisition" or "User Acquisition": These can be filtered to include sessions with Paid Search as their traffic source and specific events that have been flagged as a conversion within Google Analytics 4. If the data has been collected, GA4 should be automatically including paid sources in many of the tables and graphs in the default reports.

Closing the Loop: Importing GA4 Conversions into Google Ads

For your new data setup to truly power your campaigns, there’s one final step: importing your GA4 conversion events into Google Ads. This lets you use those Goals for campaign bidding and optimization.

  1. In Google Ads, go to Tools & Settings (the wrench icon) > Measurement > Conversions.

  2. Click the New conversion action button.

  3. Select Import, choose Google Analytics 4 properties, and then select Web.

  4. You'll see the list of conversion events from your GA4 property that we set up earlier. Select the ones you want to use for campaign measurement and click Import and Continue.

Now, when you create or edit a campaign in Google Ads, you can choose to optimize it based on these newly imported conversions, creating a powerful feedback loop to improve performance.

Final Thoughts

Connecting Google Analytics and Google Ads gives you the visibility needed to move beyond vanity metrics like clicks and CTR and focus on actual business outcomes. By understanding which ad campaigns drive profitable customer actions, you can confidently invest more in what works, cut what doesn't, and achieve a far greater return on your ad spend.

Getting this level of unified C-suite reporting doesn't have to be rocket science or require hours spent navigating complicated analytics software. Creating easy-to-digest dashboards becomes seamless and allows for any kind of data to be shared quickly within your teams. As you get more comfortable analyzing performance within these native platforms, you'll find that it means you need to go into the individual platforms to understand your ad spend and return. This manual reporting can become a huge time drain to keep everyone in the business updated with the latest intel about the current reality of the entire marketing mix and funnel.

This constant need to keep updating is what we specifically design our platform Graphed to help our clients automate their dashboards for a wide range of different platforms and provide the single-click option of exporting anything into something like your favorite slideshow software or in beautiful design PDFs that you can share across teams. Once it's set up, it becomes easier than ever to not just provide these reports on demand but on a regular cadence. We make it easy to connect directly to all of them - like Google Ads, Google Analytics, Shopify, Facebook Ads, and many more - allowing you one place to view your marketing funnel. All of these platforms are connected with just a few clicks. This saves you countless hours of toggling between different platforms, so you get to your next great insights and business opportunities and stay focused instead on spending so much time making a presentable set of marketing reports or executive dashboards.