How to Use Google Analytics for Ads

You’re spending money on ads, but can you prove they’re actually generating valuable results beyond just clicks and impressions? To see the full picture, you need to go beyond the metrics inside your ad platforms. This guide will walk you through how to use Google Analytics 4 to accurately measure the performance of all your advertising campaigns, understand post-click user behavior, and make smarter decisions with your ad budget.

Beyond Clicks: Why Use Google Analytics for Ad Tracking?

Platforms like Facebook Ads Manager or Google Ads provide useful performance data, but they only tell part of the story. They excel at showing you what happens before someone clicks (impressions, CTR, cost-per-click), but they have a limited view of what happens after the click.

Google Analytics bridges that gap. It’s the source of truth for on-site behavior, showing you exactly how visitors from your ad campaigns interact with your website. Instead of just knowing an ad got a click, you can answer critical questions like:

• Did visitors from my Facebook ad campaign actually buy anything?
• Which Google ad group drives users who spend the most time on my site?
• Are visitors from my LinkedIn ads viewing our pricing page or just bouncing immediately?
• How does paid traffic compare to my organic social media or email marketing efforts?

By connecting your ad data with on-site behavior data in GA4, you can move from measuring simple clicks to measuring true return on investment (ROI).

Step 1: The Foundation for Tracking Success

Before you can analyze anything, you need to ensure GA4 is receiving the correct data from your ad platforms. This process differs slightly depending on whether you’re running Google Ads or ads on other platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, or email newsletters.

A) Linking Google Ads to Google Analytics 4

For Google Ads campaigns, the process is streamlined and essential. Natively connecting the two platforms unlocks a wealth of detailed data that you can't get otherwise.

Here’s how to link your accounts:

1. Log in to your Google Analytics 4 account.
2. Click on the Admin gear icon in the bottom-left corner.
3. In the Property column, scroll down to Product Links and click on Google Ads Links.
4. Click the blue Link button in the top right.
5. Click Choose Google Ads accounts and select the ad account(s) you manage. Click Confirm.
6. Click Next. On the next screen, it is highly recommended to leave Enable Personalized Advertising and Enable Auto-Tagging turned on. Auto-tagging automatically adds a special parameter (the GCLID) to your ad URLs, which is how GA4 recognizes the traffic and pulls in detailed campaign data.
7. Click Next, review your settings, and then click Submit.

That’s it! Your accounts will now be linked. It can take up to 24-48 hours for data to start flowing between the platforms. Once complete, you’ll be able to see Google Ads-specific dimensions like Session Google Ads campaign and Session Google Ads ad group directly within your GA4 reports.

B) Tracking All Other Ads with UTM Parameters

What about your campaigns on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or in your email newsletters? For these, you need to manually tag your destination URLs with Urchin Tracking Module, or UTM parameters.

UTM parameters are simple bits of text you add to the end of a URL to tell Google Analytics where the visitor came from. When someone clicks a link with these tags, GA4 reads them and neatly categorizes the traffic in your reports.

There are five main UTM parameters you can use:

• utm_source: The platform or website sending the traffic (e.g., facebook, linkedin, april_newsletter). This is required.
• utm_medium: The marketing medium or channel (e.g., cpc, social, email). This is required.
• utm_campaign: The specific campaign you’re running (e.g., summer_sale_2024, webinar_promo). This is required.
• utm_content: Used to differentiate ads or links that point to the same URL (e.g., blue_image_ad vs. video_ad). This is optional but helpful for A/B testing creative.
• utm_term: Used to identify paid search keywords. Since Google Ads auto-tagging handles this for you, you’ll rarely need to use it manually.

How to Build a UTM-Tagged URL

You don't have to write these by hand. Google provides a free Campaign URL Builder tool that makes it easy.

Let’s say you’re running a Facebook ad campaign for a summer sale. Here is how you might fill out the builder:

• Website URL: https://www.yourstore.com/summer-sale
• Campaign Source: facebook
• Campaign Medium: cpc (for "cost per click," a common tag for paid ads)
• Campaign Name: summer_sale_2024
• Campaign Content: image_ad_beach

The tool will generate a URL like this:

https://www.yourstore.com/summer-sale?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=summer_sale_2024&utm_content=image_ad_beach

You would then use this full URL as the destination link in your Facebook ad. Now, when someone clicks it, GA4 will know they came from the "summer_sale_2024" campaign on Facebook.

Crucial Tip: Consistency is everything. Decide on a clear, consistent naming convention for your sources, mediums, and campaigns (e.g., always use facebook, not Facebook or fb.com). Mismatched tags will split your data across different rows and make analysis messy.

Step 2: Finding Your Ad Data in GA4 Reports

Once your tracking is properly configured, you can start digging into the data. The primary report you'll use is the Traffic acquisition report.

Navigate to Reports > Acquisition > Traffic acquisition.

This report shows you where your website sessions are coming from, grouped by channel. The default view uses the Session default channel group dimension. Thanks to your tracking setup, GA4 will automatically categorize your traffic correctly.

• Traffic from your linked Google Ads account appears under Paid Search.
• Traffic from your UTM-tagged Facebook ads (with utm_medium=cpc) will appear under Paid Social.

This gives you a great high-level overview, but to see specific campaigns, you need to change the primary dimension. Click the dropdown arrow next to Session default channel group and change it to Session source / medium.

Now you'll see a breakdown like:

• google / cpc (from Google Ads)
• facebook / cpc (from your Facebook ads)
• linkedin / social (from UTM-tagged organic posts or paid ads)

To go one level deeper and see the campaign name, change the primary dimension to Session campaign. Here you will see the campaign names you set up, like summer_sale_2024.

As you view these reports, pay close attention to the metrics on the right side of the table: Engaged sessions, Engagements per session, and most importantly, Conversions. This connection of traffic source to on-site outcomes is the core benefit of using GA4.

Step 3: Building a Custom Ad Performance Dashboard

While the standard reports are great, GA4's true power lies in the Explore section, where you can build custom reports from scratch.

Let's create a simple but powerful "Paid Campaign Performance" report.

1. Click on the Explore tab in the left-hand navigation.
2. Start a new exploration by choosing the Free form template.
3. Give your report a name, like "Ad Performance Dashboard."
4. Import your Dimensions: In the Variables column on the left, click the "+" symbol next to Dimensions. Search for and import the following:
5. Import your Metrics: Now click the "+" symbol next to Metrics. Search for and import:
6. Build the Report: Now, drag and drop the dimensions and metrics from the Variables column into the Tab Settings column:

Instantly, you'll have a custom table showing all your campaigns as rows, broken down by desktop, mobile, and tablet performance, with a clear view of the sessions, conversions, and revenue each generated. This kind of custom report helps you spot insights you might otherwise miss, like a campaign that performs well on desktop but fails completely on mobile, signaling an issue with your landing page experience on smaller screens.

Final Thoughts

By properly linking Google Ads and consistently using UTM parameters for all other platforms, Google Analytics becomes the universal control panel for your advertising efforts. You can finally move beyond surface-level metrics to understand which campaigns are truly driving valuable engagement and conversions on your website, allowing you to optimize your ad spend for real business impact.

Of course, becoming comfortable in GA4's reporting interface can take time, and manually building reports for every question can still feel like a drag. At Graphed, we remove that friction by connecting directly to your tools like Google Analytics, Shopify, and Facebook Ads. Instead of hunting through reports, you can just ask a question in plain English, like "create a dashboard comparing Facebook Ads spend vs Google Ads revenue by campaign for last month," and get a live, automated dashboard in seconds. We built it to give you immediate answers, so you can spend less time wrangling data and more time acting on it.