How to Import Google Analytics Goals to Google Ads

Tired of judging your Google Ads performance based on clicks and impressions alone? To truly understand what’s working, you need to connect your ad spend to the specific user actions that matter to your business - like form submissions, newsletter sign-ups, or product purchases that you’re already tracking in Google Analytics. This guide will walk you through the entire process of importing your Google Analytics 4 conversion events directly into Google Ads, step by step.

Why Bother Importing GA4 Conversions to Google Ads?

Before jumping into the "how," it's worth understanding the "why." Linking these two powerful platforms does more than just show you extra data columns. It fundamentally changes how you can manage and optimize your campaigns.

• Smarter Bidding: Once Google Ads knows what a real conversion is (instead of just a click), you can unlock automated bidding strategies like Target CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) or Maximize Conversions. The algorithm can then focus on showing your ads to people who are most likely to complete the actions you value, dramatically improving your ROI.

• Attribute Revenue to Ad Spend: By importing e-commerce transactions or goals with monetary values, you can directly attribute revenue to specific campaigns, ad groups, and keywords within the Google Ads dashboard. It closes the loop, showing you exactly how much return you're getting on your ad spend (ROAS).

• Deeper Performance Insights: Instead of cross-referencing reports by downloading CSVs and trying to stitch them together, you can see everything in one place. You'll know which ads drive valuable actions and which are just driving low-quality traffic, allowing you to reallocate your budget more effectively.

• Holistic Customer Journey Analysis: You gain a clearer picture of the path users take from seeing an ad to converting on your site. This helps you understand which campaigns are driving initial awareness versus those that are closing the final sale.

Pre-Flight Check: What You Need First

To ensure a smooth process, make sure you have a few things sorted out before you begin. Trying to link everything without these fundamentals in place is a common source of frustration.

1. Admin Level Access: You’ll need Administrative access to both the Google Ads account and the Google Analytics 4 property you want to connect. Editor-level permissions are often sufficient, but Admin access guarantees you won't hit any permission-related roadblocks.

2. The Correct Accounts: This might sound obvious, but double-check that you're working with the right GA4 property and Google Ads account, especially if you manage multiple clients or businesses.

3. Google Analytics Events Marked as Conversions: In GA4, any event can be a "conversion." You first need to tell Google Analytics which events you consider valuable. You can do this in your GA4 property by navigating to Admin > Conversions and toggling on the events you want to track (e.g., generate_lead, purchase, sign_up). Only events marked as conversions here will be available for import into Google Ads.

With those prerequisites handled, you’re ready to connect the platforms.

Step 1: Link Your Google Ads and Google Analytics Accounts

The first practical step is to create an official link between the two platforms. This allows them to securely share data with each other. If you've already done this, you can skip to the next section.

1. Navigate to your Google Analytics 4 property.

2. In the bottom left corner, click on the Admin gear icon.

3. Under the “Product Links” column in the middle, click on Google Ads Links.

4. Click the blue Link button in the top right.

5. Click on Choose Google Ads accounts. You will see a list of Google Ads accounts that your Google account has access to. Select the account you want to link by ticking the checkbox next to it, then click Confirm.

6. Click Next. Now you’ll configure the settings for the link.

7. It's highly recommended to leave Enable Personalized Advertising turned on. This is essential for building remarketing audiences.

8. Critically, make sure Enable Auto-Tagging is on. This is the magic that allows Google Analytics to attribute traffic back to specific Google Ads campaigns. If prompted, agree to enable it. If it’s already enabled in your Ads account, you’re good to go.

9. Click Next, review your settings, and then click Submit.

You should see a "Link created" confirmation message. It can sometimes take a few minutes up to a couple of hours for the link to become fully active and for data to start flowing between the platforms.

A Quick Word on Auto-Tagging

Auto-tagging is a non-negotiable setting for this process to work. When a user clicks your ad, auto-tagging automatically adds a parameter called the "GCLID" (Google Click Identifier) to your URL. This unique ID is what Google Analytics reads to understand not just that the user came from Google Ads, but which specific campaign, ad group, ad, and keyword was responsible.

Without it, all your ad traffic will just show up in Google Analytics as "google / cpc," with no further detail. You won't be able to import conversions accurately because Analytics won't have the necessary data to pass back to Ads.

Step 2: Import Your GA4 Conversions into Google Ads

Now that the accounts are linked and data is being shared, you can tell Google Ads which specific GA4 conversions you care about and want to use for campaign optimization.

1. Sign in to your Google Ads account.

2. In the top navigation bar, click on Tools and settings (the wrench icon).

3. Under the “Measurement” column, click on Conversions. This will take you to your main conversions summary page.

4. Click the blue + New conversion action button.

5. You'll be presented with several options. Choose the Import option on the right.

6. Select Google Analytics 4 properties and then select Web (or App, if applicable). Click Continue.

7. You'll now see a list of all the GA4 events that you marked as conversions back in the prerequisite step. If an event you're looking for is missing, it's almost certainly because it hasn't been toggled on as a 'conversion' inside the GA4 admin panel.

8. Select the conversion event(s) you want to import by ticking the checkboxes next to their names.

9. Click the Import and continue button at the bottom.

You'll see a success screen confirming that you've imported the conversions. You're almost done! Now you need to configure how Google Ads treats these newly imported goals.

Step 3: Configure Your Conversion Action Settings

After a successful import, your GA4 conversions will appear in your list of conversion actions. However, their default settings may not be ideal. It's wise to review and edit each one.

1. Click on the name of a conversion you just imported from the summary list. This will open its individual settings page.

2. • Goal and action optimization: For most important conversions like lead submissions or sales, leave this as "Primary action." This tells Google Ads to include this conversion in its reporting columns and use it for bidding. For smaller, supporting actions (like a "contact us page view"), you might set it as "Secondary" so it’s tracked but doesn’t influence your smart bidding.

3. • Value: If you're importing a purchase event, the value will be dynamic (it will pull the actual revenue from GA4). For goals like lead submissions, you can assign a static value (e.g., "$50") to represent its estimated worth to your business. This helps a lot when evaluating campaign profitability.

4. • Count: This setting is important.

• Choose Every for transactions (like purchases) where every single instance adds value.

• Choose One for lead generation goals (like a "Contact Us" form submission). You only want to count one conversion per user click, because five submissions from the same person after one ad click aren't really five separate leads.

1. • Lookback Windows: These settings determine how far back in time Google Ads should look to attribute a conversion to an ad interaction. The defaults are usually fine to start with, but you can adjust them based on your typical sales cycle.

2. • Attribution model: This is a big one. It determines how credit for a conversion is distributed among the different ad clicks a user made. While "Last click" used to be the default, data-driven attribution is now the standard for new conversions. It uses machine learning to assign credit more intelligently across the customer journey. You should generally stick with this default unless you have a very specific reason to change it.

Once you’ve configured your settings for each imported conversion, click Save and Done.

Verifying and Using Your Imported Conversions

After setup, your conversion actions list in Google Ads will show the status of the imported goals. At first, it might say "No recent conversions." This is normal.

It can take 24-48 hours for data to populate and for the system to start showing active tracking. Once users who clicked your ads start completing these actions, the status will change to "Recording conversions.”

To see the data in your campaign reports, simply add the "Conversions" and "Cost/Conv." columns to your Campaigns, Ad Groups, and Keywords views. Now, alongside your clicks and costs, you'll see a direct line to the outcomes that actually grow your business.

Final Thoughts

Bringing your Google Analytics conversion data into Google Ads is a powerful step toward smarter, data-driven advertising. This closes the loop between what you spend and what you earn, enabling algorithmic bidding strategies that can truly optimize for real business results, not just vanity metrics like clicks.

Taming your Google Ads and Analytics data is one thing, but that's often just two pieces of a much bigger puzzle. Answering a simple question like "Which marketing channel really drove our sales this month?" can still require pulling data from Facebook Ads, Shopify, your CRM, and more. We built Graphed to solve exactly this problem. By securely connecting all your marketing and sales data sources in one place, we let you ask complex cross-channel questions in plain English and get live, interactive dashboards in seconds - no more spreadsheets or wasted Mondays.