A. Import Analytics Goals and transactions into Google Ads as conversions
B. Adjust keyword bids in Google Ads from Google Analytics
C. View Google Ads click and cost data next to site engagement data in Analytics
D. Create remarketing lists in Analytics to use in Google Ads campaigns
Correct Answer: B. Adjust keyword bids in Google Ads from Google Analytics
If you are creating advertising campaigns for your website, you’ll want to identify and track visitors to your site to compare the success of your marketing campaigns. Google has a great feature to help with this: AdWords Ad Matching.
This feature allows Google ads Account to link to Google Analytics and achieve any goal. Well, certain things can’t be possible yet. For example, we can’t adjust keyword bids in Google Ads from the Google Analytics dashboard. Pretty confident that Google is working on that functionality and might enable it on its very next update.
When Linking a Google Ads Account to Google Analytics, What Is Not Possible?
You cannot adjust Google Ads keyword bids from within Google Analytics. That’s the direct answer, and it’s true whether you’re troubleshooting a real account or checking this for a certification exam.
Bid management, budget changes, ad copy edits, and campaign pausing all stay inside Google Ads. Linking the two platforms gives Analytics visibility into your ad performance and gives Ads access to your on-site behavioral data. It doesn’t give either platform control over the other’s core functions. That separation is intentional, and it’s worth understanding why, since it explains a lot about how to actually use this integration well.
There’s a second, closely related question people search almost as often: once you’ve linked the two accounts, what does the connection actually let you understand? Short version: how people behave on your site after they click your ad, not just whether they clicked. That’s covered in full below, and directly in the FAQ section.
Why Link Google Ads Account to Google Analytics Metrics?
First, to understand how the advertising tools built into Google Analytics function, you need to know how to use them. For that reason, it is good to look at the same time frame from Google AdWords and Google Analytics Metrics. Google AdWords can be used to place ads and boost them with remarketing features. On the other hand, the Google Analytics user interface makes it possible to see who people are on Google Sites (similar to the people on Facebook), the length of time that people stay on a website, and how long people spend.
Google Analytics or GA also provides the option to view your ads by country and in different languages and change the country where ads are placed. The ads can be customized and viewed in various settings.
For example, if you see a spike in conversions in Google Analytics, it may mean you have already seen an increase in conversions, which may have been caused by your ad or the banner ads in Google AdWords. In Google Analytics, you can see click-through rates (CTR) and conversion rates. CTR is the rate at which a user clicks on the ad, while the conversion rate is the number of people that click on the ad and then click on something else.
What You Can’t Do From Google Analytics After Linking Google Ads?
Once your accounts are linked, here’s specifically what stays off-limits inside Analytics:
- Adjusting keyword bids. Bid strategy, manual or automated, is managed entirely in Google Ads.
- Editing ad copy or creative. Headlines, descriptions, and assets are created and changed in Google Ads.
- Pausing or launching campaigns. Campaign status controls live in Google Ads only.
- Changing budgets. Daily or campaign-level budget adjustments happen in Google Ads.
- Managing targeting settings. Location, device, and audience targeting for active campaigns stay in Google Ads.
Analytics is a measurement and reporting layer. It was never built to be a second control panel for your ad campaigns.
How to Link Google Ads to Google Analytics
- First, go to your Google Analytics account in Google Webmasters. Click “Settings.”
- Under the “Display” section, click the link “Link Google Ads.”
- You will then be able to set up a few options that will show your advertisers which visitors are from Google AdWords and which visitors are from Google Analytics.
- Set up your display categories, which are general categories of visitors to your site. You can also show the results as a graph.
- Set up both categories and shows as graphs. For example, you can set the display of your “Free Portfolio Review” ad to the two graphs – one showing your real visitor numbers and one showing your estimated conversions.
- Enable a drop-down option to show all visitors as a graph, or set your graph to show only visitors from Google AdWords.
- Set up custom rules. Here are a few of the possible rules I’ve set up for my account:
How to Link Google Ads to Analytics (GA4): Step by Step
Universal Analytics was fully retired in July 2023. If you’re working from instructions that mention “Google Webmasters,” a “Display” tab, or navigating through an old-style Admin panel, those instructions are describing a product that no longer exists. Here’s the current GA4 process.
Step 1: Open Google Analytics Admin Settings
Log into Google Analytics and select the property you want to link. Click Admin in the bottom-left navigation.
Step 2: Navigate to Google Ads Links
Under the Product Links column, click Google Ads Links, then click Link.
Step 3: Choose Your Google Ads Account
Select the Google Ads account you want to connect. You’ll need edit or admin-level access on the Ads account for this to work, view-only access isn’t sufficient to complete a link.
Step 4: Configure Linking Options
Choose whether to enable auto-tagging (strongly recommended, it lets Analytics automatically capture campaign data via URL parameters without manual UTM tagging) and whether to enable Personalized Advertising features, which allow the linked data to be used for remarketing and audience-based campaigns.
Step 5: Confirm and Link
Review the settings and confirm. The link is typically active within a few minutes, though some data, particularly conversion imports, can take up to 24 hours to fully populate.
What is Possible Once Google Ads and GA4 Are Linked?
The other side of this answer matters just as much as what’s restricted.
Import GA4 conversions into Google Ads. Once linked, you can select specific GA4 conversion events (a form submission, a purchase, a signup) and import them directly into Google Ads as conversion actions, so your campaigns can optimize toward them.
See Google Ads campaign, cost, and click data inside GA4 reports. Cost, impressions, clicks, and campaign names flow into Analytics, letting you evaluate ad performance against on-site behavior in one place instead of switching between platforms.
Build audiences in GA4 and use them for remarketing in Google Ads. This is covered in detail below, and it’s the most valuable part of this entire integration.
Access cross-channel attribution. GA4’s data-driven attribution model can show you how Google Ads clicks interact with other channels across a customer’s full path to conversion, not just last-click. Businesses serving specific geographic areas often combine paid advertising insights with Local SEO Services to strengthen visibility in both local search results and Google Ads campaigns.
While GA4 helps measure advertising performance across channels, combining these insights with Professional SEO Services allows businesses to improve both paid and organic acquisition strategies using the same performance data.
Remarketing Lists via GA4 Audiences: The Most Underused Part of This Integration
Most articles on this topic stop at “you can import conversions.” That’s real, but it’s not the most powerful thing this link enables. Building remarketing audiences from GA4 behavioral events is.
Here’s what that actually means in practice. GA4 tracks granular, event-based user behavior, not just pageviews, but specific actions: how far someone scrolled, which product they viewed, whether they added something to a cart without completing checkout, how many times they’ve returned to a specific page. Once Google Ads is linked, you can build a GA4 Audience around any combination of these events and push that audience directly into Google Ads as a remarketing list.
That gives you remarketing segments far more precise than “people who visited my site in the last 30 days.” You can build a list of people who viewed a specific product three or more times but never purchased. People who added an item to their cart and abandoned it within the last 7 days. People who spent more than 3 minutes on a pricing page but didn’t convert. Each of these is a meaningfully different audience with different intent, and each deserves different ad messaging.
Pairing these remarketing audiences with Content Marketing Services allows businesses to deliver more relevant landing pages and educational content that improves conversion rates after the click.
To set this up: In GA4, go to Admin > Audiences, create a new audience using the event and condition builder, then under Audience Trigger, confirm the audience is available for use in linked Google Ads accounts. Once created, it becomes selectable as a targeting option inside Google Ads campaigns within 24 to 48 hours.
This is the functional payoff of linking these two platforms in the first place. Conversion import tells Google Ads what already worked. Behavioral remarketing audiences let you act on what almost worked.
GA4 vs. Universal Analytics: What’s Different About This Integration Now
If you learned this process on Universal Analytics, or you’re reading instructions written before 2023, a few things have fundamentally changed.
- The data model is event-based, not session-based: Universal Analytics organized data around sessions, with pageviews and events as things that happened during a session. GA4 treats everything, including pageviews, as an event. This changes how conversions are counted and how audiences are built. A GA4 conversion is any event you’ve marked as a conversion, not a goal completion inside a defined session boundary.
- Imported conversions behave differently: In Universal Analytics, imported goals were largely static once configured. In GA4, conversion events you import into Google Ads reflect your GA4 event definitions directly, so if you adjust how an event is triggered or counted in GA4, that change flows through to how Google Ads sees and optimizes toward that conversion.
- Auto-tagging and linking live in a different part of the interface entirely: There’s no “Display” settings tab anymore. Everything related to this integration lives under Admin > Product Links, described in the setup steps above.
- Audiences are more powerful and more portable: GA4 Audiences, once created, aren’t locked to a single destination. The same audience built for Google Ads remarketing can also inform other GA4 reporting and, depending on your setup, other linked Google Marketing Platform products.
More Settings to Link Google Ads to Google Analytics
Consider setting the following configuration for optimum and accurate report:
- Directed click: no – Google ads will not be shown on this page
- Geo-Targeted: yes – Google ads will be shown on this page in
- Regions and countries: yes – Google ads will be shown on this page in selected regions and countries
- Multi-channel campaigns: yes – Google ads will be shown on this page in both the ad channels
- Ad channels: yes – Google ads will be shown on this page in both my ad channels
- Multi-channel campaign: no – Google ads will not be displayed on this page
That was easy, right! Hopefully, this will help you track your ads’ progress and also give you a good idea of how to evaluate successful ad campaigns. It will automatically show traffic to your site, the search terms that led to your site, the pages users land on, and more.
A more in-depth guide on Google ads and a few tips on what to do with your budget, check out SEO services pages.
Frequently Asked Questions
You cannot adjust Google Ads keyword bids, edit ad copy, change campaign budgets, or pause and launch campaigns from within Google Analytics. These controls remain exclusively in Google Ads. Analytics can display Ads performance data and receive imported conversions, but it does not provide control over live campaign settings.
Linking the two accounts lets you understand how people behave on your website after they click your ad, not just whether the click happened. That includes on-site engagement metrics like session duration, pages viewed, bounce rate, and whether the visitor completed a conversion event. Before linking, Google Ads only tells you that a click occurred. After linking, you can see what that visitor actually did once they arrived, which is the foundation for both conversion import and GA4 Audience-based remarketing.
Yes. Once GA4 and Google Ads are linked, you can select specific GA4 conversion events and import them into Google Ads as conversion actions, allowing your campaigns to optimize directly toward those events.
Yes. Linked accounts share cost, click, impression, and campaign data, which appears in GA4 reports alongside your on-site behavioral data, giving you a combined view without switching platforms.
Because Analytics is built as a cross-channel measurement tool, not an ad platform control panel. Keeping bid, budget, and campaign management exclusively inside Google Ads preserves clear permission boundaries and prevents financial changes from being made accidentally through a reporting interface.
