When using Google Analytics for analyzing your website traffic and Google AdWords for driving traffic to your website, what is more obviously than being able to connect these to products and their data sets? The linking opportunity between Google Analytics and Google AdWords is unique and can’t be found more advanced and detailed in any other tracking tool and the benefits are clear: You will be able to see “AdWords Only” data within Google Analytics (ex CPC, CTR, ROI, Impressions and Clicks) and link this data to the data collected by the Google Analytics tracking script.

The process of linking your Google Analytics and Google AdWords accounts:

1. First of all, make sure that the login you’re using for the linking is administrator in both the Google AdWords account and the Google Analytics account.
2. Sign in to your Google AdWords account at http://adwords.google.com
3. Select “Google Analytics” from the “Tools and Analysis” menu in the main navigation of the AdWords interface.
4. Click on the “Admin” tab in the top right menu of the interface.
5. Find and click on the account that you would like to link to your AdWords account.
6. Find and click on the “Data Sources”
7. Click on the “Link Accounts” button
8. In order to link the accounts, you need to decide whether or not you want Google AdWords to tag the URL’s of your campaign automatically (Auto Tagging). If so, please click the radio button “Auto-tag my links”, if not, click on the radio button “I’ll manually tag my links”. Please be aware that tagging the campaigns is essential for understanding the effectiveness of your campaigns.
9. Click “Continue” in order to active the linking between your Google Analytics and Google AdWords accounts.

Your Google Analytics account is now linked correctly with your Google AdWords account.

Note: Please make sure that “Auto Tagging” is enabled for the AdWords account. This can be checked by going to “Preferences” in the “My account” menu. Please ensure that “Destination URL Auto-tagging” is enabled under the “Tracking” section as shown below:

<picture of auto tagging process (1-4)>

What happens if I don’t link my accounts?

• You won’t be able to see the AdWords specific metrics inside your Google Analytics account or link the AdWords data to the collected Google Analytics data.
• If your campaigns aren’t tagged manually with Google Analytics campaign parameters, your traffic from AdWords will show as Organic search traffic, which mean that you won’t be able to distinguish between your AdWords traffic and the real Organic traffic from Google.

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