Do You Need Google Analytics for Google Ads?

Running Google Ads without Google Analytics is like knowing a customer walked into your store but having no idea what they looked at, how long they stayed, or if they spoke to anyone before leaving. You’re only getting a tiny piece of the story. This article explains why connecting these two powerful platforms is an essential step for anyone serious about growing their business, helping you see the full picture, optimize your ad spend, and understand what your customers actually do after they click.

What Happens When You Run Google Ads Alone?

To be clear, you can absolutely run Google Ads campaigns without ever touching Google Analytics. Google Ads has its own conversion tracking system. You simply install a small piece of code (the Google Ads tag) on your website or use Google Tag Manager, and it will track when a user who clicked your ad completes a specific action, like making a purchase or filling out a form.

This provides essential, top-level campaign metrics right inside your Google Ads dashboard:

• Impressions: How many times your ad was seen.
• Clicks: How many times your ad was clicked.
• Cost-Per-Click (CPC): How much you paid for each click.
• Conversions: How many valuable actions were completed.
• Cost-Per-Acquisition (CPA): How much you spent to get one conversion.

For a beginner, this seems like enough. You're getting clicks, and you're seeing conversions. The problem is, this data lives in a vacuum. It tells you that a click led to a conversion, but it tells you nothing about the journey in between. You are missing all the rich behavioral data that reveals user intent, engagement, and potential friction points on your website.

Without Google Analytics, you’re flying blind on critical questions like:

• Are the people clicking my ads actually a good fit?
• Do they explore my site, or do they immediately leave?
• Which landing pages are engaging, and which ones are turning users away?
• Do ad-driven users view more pages than users from organic search?
• Are there valuable "micro-conversions" (like a newsletter signup) happening that I'm not tracking?

Answering these questions is the key to moving from simply running ads to running a truly optimized, high-return marketing strategy.

The Core Benefits of Linking Google Analytics and Google Ads

Connecting your accounts is a simple, free process that transforms your data from a black box into a clear roadmap. The real magic happens when you enrich your Google Ads performance data with the deep behavioral context that only Google Analytics can provide.

1. See the Complete Story of What Happens After the Click

Once you link the accounts, Google Analytics data starts appearing directly inside your Google Ads reporting columns. This is where everything changes. You can go beyond basic clicks and conversions and analyze crucial engagement metrics for your campaigns, ad groups, and keywords.

Key metrics you can now see include:

• Bounce Rate / Engagement Rate: (Universal Analytics / GA4) This shows what percentage of users leave your site after viewing only one page. A high bounce rate for an ad campaign with a high click-through rate is a massive red flag. It means you’re paying for clicks from an audience that isn't interested in your landing page content.
• Pages/Session: This tells you how many pages, on average, a user visits after clicking your ad. If your goal is to have users explore product offerings, a low number here indicates a problem.
• Average Session Duration: How long are users sticking around? If they click your ad and leave after 10 seconds, your landing page likely doesn't match the promise of your ad creative.

For example, you might have two keywords that both generate 10 conversions at a $20 CPA. In Google Ads alone, they look identical. But once you pull in GA data, you see that Keyword A has an 80% bounce rate while Keyword B has a 30% bounce rate and an average of 4 pages per session. Clearly, the traffic from Keyword B is far more engaged and valuable. You can now confidently allocate more budget to Keyword B, an insight you would have completely missed otherwise.

2. Build Far More Powerful Remarketing Audiences

Remarketing is one of the most effective strategies in digital advertising, allowing you to show targeted ads to people who have already visited your website. Google Ads allows you to do basic remarketing, like targeting all past website visitors. But with Google Analytics, you can get incredibly specific and strategic.

You can create sophisticated audiences in GA based on almost any behavioral signal and then import them directly into Google Ads for hyper-targeted campaigns. These audiences are a goldmine.

Consider creating audiences like:

• Shopping Cart Abandoners: Users who added an item to their cart but did not complete the purchase.
• Engaged Readers: Users who read more than two articles on your blog, indicating a strong interest in your industry.
• High-Value Prospects: Users who visited your pricing page and spent more than two minutes on the site.
• Product Category Viewers: Users who visited a specific category page (e.g., "women's running shoes") but didn't buy anything.
• Repeat Visitors: People who have come to your site more than three times in the last month but haven't converted yet.

By tailoring your ad creatives specifically to these granular segments, your message becomes far more relevant, leading to much higher conversion rates and a better return on ad spend (ROAS).

3. Import and Optimize for What Really Matters

Not all conversions are created equal. A user signing up for your newsletter is valuable, but it's not as valuable as a user making a $500 purchase. Google Analytics allows you to track and assign value to all types of conversions, from bigger e-commerce transactions to smaller "micro-conversions."

Once you've configured goals (like video views, PDF downloads, or form submissions) or set up Ecommerce tracking in Google Analytics, you can import them into your Google Ads account as conversion actions. This unlocks two powerful capabilities:

1. Optimize for Micro-Conversions: You can tell Google Ads to optimize campaigns not just for final sales, but for earlier funnel actions. This is great for lead generation or for businesses with longer sales cycles, where you want to optimize for people showing high intent.
2. Optimize for Real Revenue: When you import GA Ecommerce transaction data, your Google Ads account receives the actual revenue generated from each campaign. This allows you to use bidding strategies like Target ROAS (Return On Ad Spend), where Google's AI will automatically adjust your bids to maximize total revenue, not just the number of conversions.

4. Discover How Google Ads Assists Other Channels

A customer's journey is rarely linear. They might see a Facebook post, search for your brand on Google, click an ad, leave, get a remarketing ad, and finally convert by typing your URL directly into their browser. Google Ads, by itself, will only claim credit if the conversion happened immediately after an ad click.

Google Analytics provides multi-channel funnel reports that show the bigger picture. You can see "assisted conversions," which reveal how many times your Google Ads campaigns were a touchpoint on the path to a conversion, even if they weren't the final click. This data is critical for proving the true value of your campaigns. You might discover that your top-of-funnel brand awareness campaigns aren't driving many direct conversions, but they are assisting a huge number of them, making them instrumental to your overall strategy.

How to Link Google Analytics 4 with Google Ads

The good news is that linking your accounts is incredibly straightforward and takes less than a minute. Here’s a quick step-by-step guide.

First, ensure you have the right permissions: You'll need Administrator access on your Google Ads account and Editor role on your Google Analytics 4 property.

1. Navigate to the Admin section in Google Analytics 4 (the gear icon in the bottom-left).
2. In the "Property" column, look for the "Product Links" section and click on Google Ads Links.
3. Click the blue Link button.
4. Click Choose Google Ads accounts and select the account(s) you manage that you want to link. Click Confirm.
5. Click Next and review the configuration settings. It's highly recommended to leave both "Enable Personalized Advertising" and "Enable Auto-Tagging" turned on. The auto-tagging feature is what appends the gclid parameter to your URLs, allowing the platforms to share data properly.
6. Click Next again, review your selections, and click Submit.

That's it! Your accounts are now linked. It can take up to 24 hours for the data to begin flowing between the platforms and appearing in your reports.

Final Thoughts

While you can technically run Google Ads without connecting to Google Analytics, doing so puts you at a significant disadvantage. By relying only on native ads tracking, you're willingly ignoring the rich customer behavior data that explains the why behind your campaign performance. Linking these accounts is the first step toward making smarter, data-informed decisions that improve your ROI and grow your business.

Making sense of performance across all your different channels - from Google Ads and Google Analytics to your CRM or e-commerce platform - is the next major challenge. Instead of toggling between a dozen tabs to stitch together a complete picture, we built Graphed to unify your data automatically. By connecting all your tools, you can use simple, natural language to ask questions and instantly build dashboards that show you the entire customer journey, unlocking insights in seconds that used to take hours of manual reporting.